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SYLLABUS 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 



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J. Mi HART 

(UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI) 



ADAPTED FROM BEENEARD TEN BRINK'S 
GESCHICHTE DER ENGLISCBEN LITTERATUR 






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CINCINNATI 
EOBEET CLAEKE & CO 

1881 



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COPYEIGHT, 1S81 

BY J. M. HAET 



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ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 



CHAPTEE I. 

ROMAN BRITAIN. 



1. The earliest known inhabitants of England be- 
longed to the Keltic race, and were called Britons. 
When Julius Csesar invaded the island, 55 B. C, they 
were still in a barbarous or semi-barbarous state. A 
serious attempt to annex the island permanently to the 
Roman empire was not made until 43 A. L>., in the reign 
of Claudius. The work of conquest was continued dur- 
ing the reigns of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, and 
was complete by 85 A. D. From that time until the 
5th century Britannia and the southern part of Scotia 
w T ere administered as a Roman province. Roman law, 
manners, and letters were introduced. Large towns 
grew up, e.g., York, London, Lincoln. There was a 
thriving trade between the island and the continent. 
Extensive remains of roads, aqueducts, tesselated pave- 
ments, and the like, still bear witness to the thorough- 
ness of the conquest. When the Roman world became 
christianized, Britain also shared in the conversion. 
By the middle of the 4th century the island had its 
hierarchy and a well developed system of religious or- 
ders and monasteries. 

We do not know whether the primitive Britons pos- 
sessed anything that could be called a literature of their 
own, and, if so, of what character. Roman literature 
was imported, so to speak, but we have no means of as- 
certaining whether it exerted any strong direct influence 



Z ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

on the mass of the natives. Britain was for the Romans 
nothing more than a military outpost. The garrison 
consisted usually of 20,000 — 30,000 men, stationed at im- 
portant strategic points, which were connected by mili- 
tary roads. The children of the leading native families 
were probably educated at first in the city of Rome, 
as hostages, subsequently at home in Roman schools 
under the supervision of the Roman governor. The 
inferior population in and around the Roman towns and 
camps acquired from soldiers and public officials a knowl- 
edge of the Latin tongue sufficient for the ordinary inter- 
course of life. But the rural population, which must 
have largely predominated, remained in all probability 
Keltic in habits, tastes, feelings, and speech. Roman 
administration, it is true, w T as as energetic and efficient 
in Britain as elsewhere. It suppressed, for instance, 
the savage rites and practices of Druidism, and secured 
to every man protection in the enjoyment of life and 
property. But we have no warrant for believing that 
Roman culture pervaded and transformed Britain as it 
pervaded Gaul and Spain. It was at best only an ex- 
otic, and it w T as swept away by the first breath of ad- 
versity. 

2* In consequence of the dangers which threatened 
the continental and more vital parts of the empire, the 
Roman army was withdrawn from the island early in 
the 5th century, and the Britons were left to struggle 
unaided against their Keltic kinsmen, the Picts and 
Scots on the north, and the Irish on the west (the coast 
of Wales), and agairi3t the German tribes that came in 
ever-growing numbers from across the North Sea. Tra- 
dition tells us that these Germans were invited by the 
Britons to help them against the Picts and Scots ; after 
defeating the northern invaders in a series of bloody 
battles, the Germans then turned their arms against 



COMING OF THE GERMANS. 6 

their hosts, the Britons. The tradition is to be found in 
Bede, Xennius, and Geoffrey of Monmouth ; the story 
of Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and Rowena, as it has 
been graphically narrated by Geoffrey, is doubtless fa- 
miliar to most readers. But it is impossible at the pres- 
ent day to unravel the true and the fabulous in the 
story. There is evidence going to show that Germanic 
tribes had settled in considerable numbers along the 
eastern and south-eastern coast, even before the end of 
the 4th century. The only fact which need concern the 
student of literature is that Germau-speaking tribes be- 
gan a conquest of the island in the course of the 5th 
century, and had finished it substantially by the end of 
the 6th century. This second conquest was in every re- 
spect unlike the first. It was not a mere military occu- 
pation, it was a settlement in mass. The invaders 
brought with them or sent for their families, and sought 
to make the land their lasting home. Hence the war be- 
tween them and the Britons could result only in the 
total subjection and dispossession of the weaker party. 
The Britons were finally dispossessed. Many were slain 
outright in battle, others killed off in petty feuds, others 
driven across the channel to the Armor i can peninsula in 
Frauce, still others hemmed in among the mountain 
fastnesses of Wales. By the year 610 the eastern part 
of the island as far north as the Firth of Forth, all the 
southern and central parts, and the western part (except 
Wales, Cornwall, and Devonshire) as far north as the 
river Mersey, were in the hands of the Germans. It is 
usually asserted that the war against the Britons w T as one 
of utter extermination. But it is more probable that 
numerous small isolated communities of Britons sur- 
vived in the western and south-western portions of what 
is now England proper, and were only absorbed in the 
course of centuries, by the slow process of intermarriage. 



4 ANGLO SAXON LITERATURE. 

Henceforth the country is called by its German name 
of England. 

3. The permanent vestiges of the British race in the 
land that was once their own may he briefly summed up 
as follows. The Kelto-British tongue has disappeared 
wholly from England proper, and survives only in 
Welsh, now spoken by about a million of people. A 
dialectic variety known as Cornish became extinct early 
in the present century. According to some scholars, 
certain peculiarities in the pronunciation of the rural 
population in the south-western and western counties of 
England are of Keltic origin. The Britons, in disap- 
pearing, transmitted to their conquerors a few Latin 
words imposed upon them by the Ho mans, e.g., castrum, 
in early English ceaster,m modern English caster, Chester, 
cester, as in the name Chester, and in the compounds 
Dorchester, Winchester, Lancaster, Leicester, and the 
like. Also colonia, in Lincoln; strata, in our word 
'street;' iporta, in Newport; milia in 'mile.' Proba- 
bly also our words 'tile' and 'pear' were derived 
from the Romans through the Britons. Concerning 
other words of Latin origin, e.g., ' candel, 1 ' bishop,' 
' priest,' ' mass,' it is impossible to decide whether 
they were transmitted through the Britons, or were bor- 
rowed by the English directly from Rome. Further- 
more, the early English adopted and retained some 
Keltic words. These are not numerous. They are 
chiefly names of familiar household objects, or names of 
places, especially rivers. Among the latter are Thames, 
Trent, Tweed, Severn, Avon (which is Keltic for running 
water in general), and the group of names Usk, Ux, 
Wis (in Wisbec), Eske, Ouse — all modifications of the 
Keltic uisc ' water,' which is also found in the High- 
land usquebagh, corrupted into ' whisky,' and standing 
for a primitive uisce vaha, meaning ' water of life ;' but 



SURVIVAL OF BRITISH WORDS. 5 

this word usquebagh has been introduced into English in 
quite recent times. To the former class belong the 
words l basket/ ' bran,' ' w T icket,' ' clout,' ' crag.' An 
American will readily understand the fate of the 
Keltic language in England, by comparing it with that 
of the Indian language in this country. Although the 
Indians themselves have disappeared from the greater 
part of the United States, their language survives in 
Susquehanna, Juniata, Potomac, Mississippi, Ohio, Ni- 
agara, etc., and in wigwam, wampum, squaw, toma- 
hawk, moccasiu, succotash, etc. 

There are no traces of any influence exerted by the 
Britons upon early English literature. The invaders 
brought with them not only their own language, but 
also their own — still heathen — worship, and the germs 
and even the beginning of a distinctively German poetic 
literature. So long as the contest lasted, and for cen- 
turies afterward, literature in England was either dis- 
tinctly German, or was based upon the general Roman 
Catholic literature of the continent. It is not until the 
12th century, after England had been conquered by 
the Normans, that we observe a sudden and curious 
outgrowth of British, i.e., Welsh literature. But this 
point can be treated only in connection with the Arthur- 
ian cycle of romance. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE GERMAN CONQUERORS. 

4. The Germans who settled in England came from 
Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, and from the coast to 
the west of the Elbe, known as Friesland. They were a 
sturdy, warlike race, inured from childhood to privation 
and danger. Their home was preeminently a trai ning- 



6 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

school for sailors. They and their successors, the Danes 
and Norsemen, were as sea-robbers the terror of Europe. 
The 5th century was a turning point in history; it 
marked the prostration of the Western Roman empire. 
Northern Gaul was seized by the Franks, Southern Gaul 
by the Goths, Eastern Gaul by the Burgundians. The 
Langobards established themselves even in Northern 
Italy. The Christian church itself, which had inspired 
the noblest hopes and efforts of humanity, appeared in 
danger of an eclipse. Culture and knowledge were 
scarcely safe in the refuge of the cloister. Everywhere 
was to be seen the foot-print of a ruthless heathen in- 
vader. No wonder, then, that the Latin writers (chiefly 
ecclesiastics) of the 5th and 6th centuries indulged in 
bitter lamentations. The Frank and the Saxon, the 
Goth and the Dane, were in their sight devils sent by an 
angry God to punish the world for sin. Their sufferings 
were too recent, their imaginations too heated, for them 
to think clearly. Yet it is from them that we derive our 
knowledge of the great Germanic Migration. The Ger- 
mans themselves were too busy fighting and plundering 
to think of recording their deeds autobiographically, 
even had they possessed the literary ability. It is neces- 
sary, therefore, to receive with caution the statements of 
Latin writers concerning the character of the German 
conquerors. That these latter were fierce in battle and 
eager for booty, is unquestionable. They were further- 
more given to immoderate eating and drinking, and their 
seasons of warlike exertion were followed by long spells 
of idle revelry. But they can not possibly have been the 
monsters or savages that we read of in early chronicles 
or even in some modern histories. In comparison with 
modern civilized man, they w T ere quick to shed blood ; 
but by the side of the Romans of the Republic, they ap- 
pear almost humane. We may well doubt if the so- 
called barbarian Germans during the whole period of the 



5th and 6th centuries inflicted in all Europe as much 
misery as was wrought by Julius Csesar alone in the 
eight years that he was engaged in subduing Gaul. 

We can trace the movements aud study the features of 
the German migration on the continent with tolerable 
accuracy. The records, although sparse and vitiated by 
prejudice, are in the main intelligible. But the con- 
quest of England is hopelessly obscure. We do not pos- 
sess a single contemporary record, nor indeed any record 
that is self-consistent or even plausible. All that we can 
do is to note here and there a point in the light afforded 
by the study of general European history. 

The invaders of England were all of the same race, yet 
there was diversity enough among them to lead us to es- 
tablish a threefold grouping into the Jutes (from Jut- 
land), the Angles (from Schleswig-ITolstein), and the 
Saxons, an offshoot of the great family of that name 
then occupying the regions along the middle and lower 
Elbe. The Jutes are said to have seized upon Kent ; the 
Angles occupied the eastern, the Saxons the western and 
southern parts of the island. All three groups spoke the 
same language, but in forms that differed enough to be 
called dialects. These main dialects subsist to the present 
day, and are called the northern, the southern, and the 
Kentish. Each has its sub-varieties. In general we may 
say that at no time in the history of England have the 
inhabitants of one county had much difficulty in under- 
standing the inhabitants of any other. There has never 
been such a dividing line between north and south as ex- 
ists for instance in continental Germany between High 
German and Low. The fitting title to be given to the 
common speech of England in these early days before 
the Gorman Conquest is a question which has been much 
discussed of late. One set of scholars, including Mr. 
Sweet, Mr. Freeman, Mr. Morris, Prof, ten Brink, assert 
that the only rightful title is ' Old-English.' Another 



8 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

and more numerous set prefer to call it, for the sake of 
exactness, ' Anglo-Saxon,' reserving the term ' Old-Eng- 
lish ' for the period after the Norman Conquest. Each 
terminology has its advantages and its disadvantages. 
In the following pages ' Anglo-Saxon ' will be employed 
wherever it seems desirable. 

ft 
5, Anglo-Saxon was an offshoot of Low, i.e. North- 
German speech, and resembled very closely the so-called 
Old-Saxon, the language which was spoken between the 
Lower Rhine and the Elbe and of which we possess con- 
siderable literary remains of the 9th century. Anglo- 
Saxon and Old-Saxou, in fact, resemble each other 
so closely that an English monk of those days, removing 
from Winchester to Paderborn, must have been able to 
make himself at home almost immediately. As a matter 
of history we know that many English monks did emi- 
grate to this Ehine-Elbe region in the 8th and 9th 
centuries, to labor as missionaries, and that they exerted 
a perceptible influence in shaping the ecclesiastical prose 
form of Old-Saxon. One single fact will be enough to 
illustrate the kinship of the two languages. The Anglo- 
Saxon poem on the creation and fall of man, commonly 
called Genesis and once attributed to Caedmon,was pub- 
lished by Franciscus Junius in 1655. Until 1875 it was 
supposed, as a matter of course, to be perfectly pure 
Anglo-Saxon. But in 1875 Professor Sievers showed 
conclusively that about one fifth of the poem is inter- 
polated, and that this interpolation is a fragment of an 
Anglo-Saxon version of an earlier Old-Saxon poem on 
the same subject. Whoever converted the Old-Saxon 
poem into Anglo-Saxon suffered inadvertently a few 
words and phrases to remain, that are peculiar to Old- 
Saxon and are not found elsewhere in English literature. 
Yet the general resemblance of the two languages is so 
great that these un-Englisli elements escaped the notice 



ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE AND INSTITUTIONS. V 

of scholars and editors for upwards of two centuries. 
See § 21. 

A few remarks upon the more general features of 
Anglo-Saxon speech, will not be out of place. It is rich 
in words for weapons, such as the sword, the shield, the 
spear, in words descriptive of combat, and in words re- 
lating to ships and the sea. It impresses us immediately 
as the speech of a fighting, sea-faring folk. On the 
other hand it is rich in words expressive of moods and 
emotions of the mind. We have lost many of these 
latter terms, having substituted for them words of Nor- 
man-French or Latin or Greek origin. Those which re- 
main represent the subtler and more mysterious side of 
our nature. There is one feature of Anglo-Saxon which 
does not seem to have attracted the notice of scholars in 
England, although German scholars have laid much 
stress on it. Namely, its tendency toward introspection, 
and the favoring of a sad or at least plaintive dispos- 
ition. This trait, it may be remarked in passing, still 
subsists in our modern speech. With all its robustness, 
its common-sense power of adapting itself to the realities 
of the world, English, contrasted with the Romance 
languages aud with continental German, still moves 
with an undercurrent of sadness. See § 18. 

6. Our knowledge of the institutions aud the religion 
of the Angles and Saxons at the time of their settlement 
has been obtained almost altogether from a study of kin- 
dred relations on the continent. The people were divided 
into three classes : the nobles, eorlas ; the simple freemen, 
ceorlas; and the slaves. The chief among the nobles, 
the princes, gathered around them a retinue of devoted 
personal adherents, the thegnas, or ' thanes.' As the 
princes grew in power and dignity, and — by reason of 
greater familiarity with Roman institutions — assumed 
more and more of the prerogatives of the Roman em- 



10 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

perors, these thegnas attained to the position of a court- 
nobility, outranking the elder hereditary nobility of the 
eorlas. They were enriched by gifts of land conquered 
in war, and held their possessions upon condition of ren- 
dering military service. We thus find the outlines of 
the feudal system clearly marked in England in the 
Anglo-Saxon period, although the system reached its 
full development only after and in consequence of the 
Norman Conquest. This feudal or semi-feudal spirit is 
worthy of especial note, for it pervades all the early 
poetry of England. In the poetry of heathen origin it 
is of course conspicuous. The prince is constantly de- 
scribed as the giver of rings and gold bracelets, of costly 
helmets and trusty swords. A right-minded prince is a 
free giver ; an ignoble prince is grasping and miserly. 
On the other hand, a loyal thane is one who shows him- 
self worthy of his lord's munificence, standing by him in 
danger and perishing with him in battle. This notion of 
giving and receiving, of generosity and personal attach- 
ment, is the key-note of all early German heroic poetry. 
In Anglo-Saxon literature we find it almost as pro- 
nounced in Christian as in heathen poetry. God is the 
giver of life and health ; life is a loan from the Maker, 
and death a calling-in of the loan. Christ is the prince 
of glory, and the apostles are his faithful thanes. Satan 
and his companions are faithless thanes, and their rebel- 
lion is an ungrateful breach of allegiance. 

7. We know even less of the religion of the Angles and 
Saxons than of their political institutions. Several quite 
recent discoveries have shaken the confidence of scholars 
in former theories based upon the JEdda. It is at best 
doubtful whether the subject of Old-German heathen be- 
lief can be made intelligible to any one not familiar with 
the general processes and results of comparative mythol- 
ogy. Only a few of the striking features will be given here, 



ANGLO-SAXON MYTHOLOGY. 11 

and even these will be of a negative rather than of a pos- 
itive character. The Angles and Saxons, like their con- 
tinental kinsmen, worshipped certain so-called divinities, 
Othin, Thor, Loki, Freya, &c. These divinities were 
originally nature-myths, that is, forces or phenomena of 
nature, such as the wind, thunder, fire, the fertility of 
the earth, personified and invested with human attributes, 
male or female. There is an unquestionable similarity, 
or parallelism, between the German divinities, and those 
of Greece and of India, so much so that scholars are 
agreed in assigning all three groups to one common prim- 
itive Indo-European conception of nature. The differ- 
ences among the three are due in general to the greater 
or less thoroughness with which a nature-force or phe- 
nomenon has been reduced to purely human shape and 
proportions, or — to use the technical term — has been an- 
thropomorphized. In this respect the German group 
stands midway between the Indian and the Greek. The 
Vedic divinities, e.g. Agni, the god of fire, Vaya, the 
god of the wind, Indra, the god of the clear sky, Usha, 
the goddess of the dawn, are still unmistakable nature- 
forces ; they can scarcely be called ' persons ' at all. On 
the other hand Jupiter, Xeptune, Apollo, Venus, &c, 
have lost almost every trace of their origin and have be- 
come mere men and women of extraordinary powers. 
Whereas the German Othin, Thor and their associates, 
although no longer mere myths, are not yet mere men 
and women. • They lack that sharpness of outline and 
that perfect intelligibility which constitute the charm of 
the Olympic gods in Homer. They come down aud 
move among men, they fight side by side with heroes, 
but they never cease to be misty, supernatural, phantas- 
magoric. 

"We know far less of the Germanic system than of the 
Greek or the Indian, and the explanation is obvious 
enough. Both Greeks and Hindoos developed their 



12 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

systems naturally and fully, not only in literature but in 
painting and sculpture, before coming in contact with 
Christianity. The Germans, on the contrary, were con- 
verted to Christianity before they had fairly begun the 
literary or pictorial expression of their heathen concep- 
tion. In accepting Christian doctrines they gave up de- 
liberately their early beliefs. It became a matter of con- 
science with them to ignore everything anterior to Chris- 
tianity as crude and barbarous. The priests of the Ro- 
man Catholic church were inflexible in their efforts to 
eradicate whatever savored of heathenism in manners, 
customs, and even speech. There is more than one pas- 
sage in the poem of Beowulf, for instance, which has 
evidently been altered to suit ecclesiastical requirements. 
It is not surprising, then, that the remains we possess of 
early heathen literature should be so fragmentary and 
confused. The wonder is rather that so much should 
have escaped the general destruction. 

Concerning the religion of the heathen Germans, we 
should not be safe in asserting more than the following : 
it had no priesthood, no distinct order to mediate be- 
tween men and gods; it exacted no sacrifice of human 
blood, although victims, usually captives, were occa- 
sionally slain upon the altar; it paid great respect to 
women, investing them with a quasi-prophetic sacred 
character; it looked upon cowardice and treachery as the 
basest of vices ; it held out the hope of a future life re- 
producing the main features of life on earth ; its service 
consisted chiefly of warlike hymns or chants. 



HYMNIC AND HEROIC POETRY. 13 

CHAPTER III. 

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE EARLY POETRY. 

8. The earliest poetry among the Germans was of a 
religious kind, in the shape of hymns to the gods upon 
solemn occasions. Being addressed directly to the gods, 
it was necessarily an expression of mythological con- 
ceptions. And as the hymns were sung, or at least 
chanted, they were composed in short strophes or stanzas. 
Eemains of such hymnic poetry are quite evident in the 
Edda. In Anglo-Saxon literature they are barely dis- 
cernible. 

In Germany proper and in England hymnic poetry 
was superseded by heroic verse. To understand the 
growth of this latter system, we must keep in view the 
general tendencies of European history. The fifth cen- 
tury was a turning-point not only for the Roman world 
but for the German conquerors themselves. It was the 
beginning of their ' heroic age/ To us, who study the 
events of the great Migration in a critical spirit, with 
the aid of contemporary Latin records, such leaders as 
Theoderic, King of the Goths, are actual men like our- 
selves, without a trace of the supernatural. But it was 
quite otherwise with the illiterate but imaginative de- 
scendants of the Goths, the Franks, or the Burgundians, 
in the 6th and subsequent centuries. PojDular imag- 
ination, stimulated by oral tradition, endowed the great 
chieftains of the 5th century with superhuman strength 
and courage, and crowned their deeds with the halo of 
romance. Great men became, in a word, ' heroes,' and 
their deeds became the theme of popular poetry. This 
secular poetry, in supplanting the elder hymns, retained 
not a few of their mythological elements. Attributes 



14 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

and actions of the gods were transferred to the heroes, 
thereby making them semi-mythical. The process will be 
treated more fully in the remarks upon the Beowulf poem, 
§ 12. For the present it will be enough to say that the 
new heroic poetry first found expression in short pieces, 
commemorating a single exploit of some well known 
hero. The poem places us, without any prelude, in the 
very midst of the action, and the actors reveal their 
character and antecedents by what they do and say. A 
striking instance is the Hildebrands-lied, in Old-German 
of the 8th century. It begins : " I heard tell that Hilde- 
brand and Hadubrand, in between the two armies, made 
ready their armor, girded on their swords. And Hilde- 
brand, he was the elder, inquired of the other, in few 
words, who his father might be, &c." He himself is the 
father; he had fled from home twenty years before, on 
account of political troubles, and had taken refuge with 
Dietrich (i.e., Theoderic), at the court of Attila, King ot 
the Huns. Now he is returning home at the head of an 
army, to recover his possessions, but is stopped by his 
son, who has in the meanwhile grown to manhood. By 
dint of questioning, the father finds out that his foe is 
his son, and declares himself. But the son refuses to 
believe, reviles him for < an old Hun/ and insists upon 
fighting. The father's lament at being thus forced to 
an unnatural combat is extremely touching. The poem 
breaks off at the first encounter, so that what we have 
is only a fragment. Most scholars are of the opinion 
that it ended tragically, with the death of the son. 

The strophe or stanza of the elder hymnic poetry was 
unsuited to these new heroic poems, which were not 
sung but recited. It was therefore discarded, except in 
the literature of Scandinavia, and for it was substituted 
a continuous flow of verse. The difference between 
stanza-verse and continuous verse may be readily felt by 
comparing the Faery Queen with Paradise Lost. In a 



FORMATION OP HEROIC POETRY. 15 

narrative piece of any length, it is impossible for the 
poet to express each successive thought or action in a 
fixed number of lines. Either he will have too little to 
say, and consequently will eke out the stanza with a 
superfluous line or two ; or he will have too much to say, 
and will carry over the sentence into the succeeding 
stanza, thereby occasioning an awkward enjambement, or 
' straddling.' 

In the course of time the short episodic poems grouped 
themselves into longer poems, commemorating a series 
of deeds by a certain hero, or the fortunes of a hero and 
his companions, or a long chain of events in which 
many members of a family or leaders of a tribe partici- 
pated. Such longer pieces may be called * epics.' An 
instance of a modern poem in imitation of a medieval 
epic is Tennyson's Enid; on the other hand the Lady of 
Shalott, like the Hildebrands-lied, is episodic. The Iliad 
and the Odyssey are examples of epic poetry in its perfec- 
tion. Finally, all the poems, episodic and epic, and all 
the scattered traditions relating to one set of heroes and 
events constitute what is called a l cycle ' of fable. 
Thus, Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, Sir Galahad, Idylls of 
the King, &c, are parts of the great medieval cycle of 
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. 

9. There was not among the early Germans a sepa- 
rate class of singers or poets. All, from the King down 
to the simple ceorl, had the right to sing in public assem- 
blies. It was even expected of every one present at the 
board, when the mead-cup and the harp were passed 
around, that he should contribute his share to the even- 
ing's entertainment. The custom, which still lingers in 
the Rundgesang of modern Germany, is well illustrated 
by the story told of Caedmon, see § 20. These old Ger- 
man and English ' songs' were not songs in the modern 
sense ; they were ' recitals ' of the great deeds of popu- 



16 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

lar heroes. Both speaker and listener were familiar, 
through long practice, with the leading events in the 
history of the trihe or the nation, and with the ancestry, 
life, character, and hahits of each hero. Hence the 
abruptness of snch poetry. The singer has a right to 
take for granted that his hearers are as familiar as him- 
self with the substance of the story he is to narrate. 
He not only plunges boldly in medias res, e.g., in the Hil- 
debrands-lied above mentioned, but he interrupts the 
course of the main narrative with allusions to persons 
and events indirectly connected with it. Such allusions 
are often quite brief. They can not in strictness be 
called obscure, for doubtless they were understood at 
once by the original hearers. But to a modern reader 
they are extremely difficult. 

The substance of the stories handed down to us in 
Anglo-Saxon and other Old-German is eminently a pro- 
duct of the popular mind. Generation after generation 
labored upon the stories before they assumed the shape 
in which we have them. !N"o less popular is the form of 
verse. It is at once simple, powerful, and flexible. It 
was not too difficult for the common. man to use, yet in 
the mouth of an accomplished narrator it was capable of 
expressing all that the mind of those early days was 
capable of conceiving. 

This Old-German verse is usually called, after its most 
striking feature,. ' alliterative.' The number of S3 7 llables 
in the verse is not fixed exactly; nor can we say that the 
verse is divided into ' feet.' There is no terminal rime. 
Each full verse (line), as printed in recent editions, is to 
be read in two sections nearly but not quite equal. In 
early editions the sections were printed as separate lines. 
The two sections produce an effect not unlike that of a 
modern < couplet,' for they are coupled together by cer- 
tain words beginning with the same sound, i.e., they are 
said to ' alliterate.' Thus : 



ALLITERATIVE VERSE, 17 

flota famighals fugle gelicost 

the ship foamy-necked, to a fowl most like 

The three /-sounds alliterate. Any vowel may allit- 
erate with any other vowel, e.g. 

Tha com in gan ealdor thegna 

Then came in-going the prince of the thanes 

The verb com with the dependent compound infinitive 
in-gdn is equivalent to the modern ' entered/ The i of 
the prefix in alliterates with the ea of ealdor. Strictly a 
consonant can. alliterate only with itself; but there are 
some licenses. In the most correct verse there are two 
alliterative sounds in the first section of the line and one 
in the second. But very frequently there is only one in 
each, and sometimes we find two in each, although not 
often in Anglo-Saxon poetry. It has been stated above 
that there is no terminal rime in alliterative verse. This 
is strictly true of the heathen poetry, and also in general 
of the Christian poetry until a comparatively late period, 
when we find rimes creeping in. They are an imitation 
of the Latin hymns of the Catholic church, and the 
forerunners of our modern system. Hence they are 
nearly always to be considered as symptoms of a decline 
of the early alliterative system. See § 30. 

The alliteration rests 'usually on the emphatic words 
of the sentence. Sound and sense, therefore, go hand 
in hand and help each other! When properly read, an 
alliterative poem is easy, flowing, and dignified. It 
has moreover a peculiar power which the scholar alone 
will appreciate and which can not be reproduced in any 
modern imitation. One reason is that our early speech 
abounded in standing epithets, and set phrases and form- 
ulae, which have ceased to exist. Besides, modern imi- 
tators fail to perceive that alliteration is something more 
than the mere recurrence of a certain sound two or three 
times in the course of the line. The line itself has a 



18 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

structure of its own ; it is, as already stated, a couplet in 
which the first part is balanced by the second. We need 
only compare a line from the Beowulf-poem with a line 
from Tennyson. 

The Anglo-Saxon poet says : 

Gewat tha ofer waegholm winde geffsed 
Flota famighals fugle gelicost 
Went then over the wave-top, by the wind urged, 
The ship &c. 

The ge in gewat is unaccented and the following w al- 
literates with those in ivdeg and winde. The whole line 
makes upon the ear a very different effect from Tenny- 
son's : 

They wept and wailed but led the way 

Tennyson also gives us, it is true, three w's, but we feel 
that the phrase ' but led the way ' does not ' balance' the 
preceding, and we wait instinctively for the next line : 

To where a little shallop lay 

to complete the effect, by mepns of its rime ' way : lay.' 
But this rime is no alliteration. 

10. Anglo-Saxon poetry differs from modern English 
in its style also. The language is synthetic, i.e., it de- 
notes grammatical relations by varying the forms of 
words. It is not tied down to the modern logical order: 
subject, copula, predicate. The poet is, in general, free 
to arrange the words with a view to their effect upon the 
ear and the imagination. Hence inversions are quite 
common. There is also a marked tendency to amplifi- 
cation. An object is described, an action narrated by suc- 
cessive sets of phrases, that are not to be taken as repe- 
titions but as shiftings of the view-point. Thus, in the 
passage cited, § 9, the ship is spoken of as i the floating 
thing,' then as 'the twining or curved stem.' The ap- 
proach to land is given in three phrases ; they (the mari- 



STYLE OF HEROIC POETRY. 19 

ners) saw 'the strand-cliffs,' 'the steep hills,' 'the broad 
sea-promontories.' In modern speech such amplification 
might be wearisome ; but in primitive poetry it adds life 
and variety. The poet seems to be reproducing from 
memory his impressions in the order in which they were 
made upon his mind. Finally, the language is rich in 
plain and obvious similies, but not in formal comparisons. 
The body is called bdn-loca, the 'bone-case;' to make a 
speech is ' to unlock the treasure of words in one's breast.' 
The scream of the ravens gathering around the corpses 
after the fight is called the ' evening-song;' the hissing 
of the sword in battle is also a 'song.' The battle itself 
is called ecga geldc, the ' play of edges.' 

It was stated, § 9 beginning, that there was no sepa- 
rate class of poets. Song-craft was the common posses- 
sion of all. Nevertheless certain men must have been 
more richly endowed than others with poetic gifts. They 
were sweet singers by eminence. Some few excepted, 
they have not left a record of their names, nor can we 
identify their names with any of the poems that we 
possess. But the tradition of such poets was preserved 
until late in the Middle Ages. A notable instance is 
Horaut, who figures in the great German epic of Gudrun, 
and of whom the poem tells us that when he sang, the 
birds ceased to warble, the sick forgot their pains, the 
workman stopped, the beasts of the wood, the fish in the 
water, the very insects in the grass, paused to listen. 
Ho rant, then, is the counterpart to Orpheus. Both name 
and works of at least one poet among the Angles and 
Saxons, namely Cynewulf, have been preserved. See § 24. 

In estimating our early heathen poetry, we should 
never forget that we have only disjointed remnants of 
what was once a large body of literature. Had we all 
the popular narrative poems current in England in the 
7th, 8th, and 9th centuries, our knowledge would be en- 
hanced a hundred-fold. We must also learn to discrim- 



20 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

inate carefully between the part played by the folk at 
large and that played by the individual in the composition 
of such poetry. The substance of the poem, i.e., the 
story, the heroes, their character and exploits, were the 
common tradition of the people. In these respects there 
was no room for poetic 'invention' in our modern 
sense. Whoever in Old England undertook to tell in 
verse of the deeds of the forefathers was not at liberty to 
add or to change a name, an incident, or a trait of char- 
acter. All that he could call his own was the manner of 
telling. And, as Lowell has put it: — 

He tells it last, who tells it best. 

We can imagine a favorite story passed along from gen- 
eration to generation, until some one poet arises, who 
succeeds in telling it so well that his version becomes the 
final one. Henceforth all that remains to be done is to 
preserve it in this shape. The name of the poet may 
disappear utterly; the story itself never was bis; but the 
version is his, even although it bear no name. 

11. One more general feature of our early poetry 
must be introduced in this place, although it obliges us 
to anticipate somewhat the course of political events. It 
w T as stated, § 4, that three varieties of speech, called dia- 
alects, were spoken in England, viz., the northern (E"orth- 
umbrian), the southern (West-Saxon, or Wessex), and 
the Kentish. We learn from history that E"orthumbria 
first rose to eminence in ecclesiastical, political, and lit- 
erary matters. It took the lead throughout the 7th and 
8th centuries. Most of the conspicuous men of England 
prior to the 9th century were Northumbrians by birth or 
by residence and education. Thus Bede, Caedmon, 
Cynewulf, &c. It is highly probable, also, that the poem 
of Beowulf was composed in North umbria. We should 
expect, therefore, to find the earliest literary remains 



NORTHUMBRIA AND WESSEX. 21 

written in the Northumbrian dialect. But this is not the 
case. All the early poetry, heathen as well as Christian, 
and almost all the early prose, are in the Wessex dialect. 
The only specimen of verse in the Northumbrian dia- 
lect of this period is a fragment of nine lines at the end 
of a Latin manuscript of Becle's Uistoria, see § 19, 20. 
If the earliest literature in England was composed in 
Northumbria, how can we account for the phenomenon 
that it has all been transmitted to us in the speech of 
Wessex? The explanation usually given is this. From 
the beginning of the 9th century Northumbria was rav- 
aged more and more by the Danes. At one time it was 
completely in their power. Being heatjicns, the} T acted 
as the Angles and Saxons themselves had acted three 
centuries before. They plundered the monasteries, which 
were the seats of learning and the libraries of those days, 
and scattered or destroyed the manuscripts. Even Wes- 
sex was in danger, and was saved only through the 
genius and energy of King Alfred. It is commonly be- 
lieved by scholars that in or before the reign of King 
Alfred a great part of early Northumbrian poetry was 
transcribed and recast in Wessex forms, and that these 
Wessex versipns have been handed down to us, while the 
Northumbrian originals perished. In consequence of the 
Danish invasions, the centre of political and literary 
activity was shifted from Northumbria to Wessex. The 
capital of King Alfred and his successors, Winchester, 
became the seat of learning. And it was here, in and 
around Winchester, that the first English prose literature 
originated. As will be shown in a subsequent place, 
King Alfred himself labored indefatigably in shaping 
this prose. Comparing the two great divisions of the 
island, then, we may say that Northumbria is entitled to 
the credit of creating our earliest poetry, Wessex to the 
two-fold credit of preserving that poetry and of creating 
our earliest prose. 



22 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

CHAPTER IV. 

BEOWULF AND OTHER HEATHEN POETRY. 

12, The poem of Beowulf is by far the most import- 
ant and interesting monument of early German poetry, 
not only by virtue of its length and the variety of inci- 
dent it affords, but by its vigor of style and the light it 
throws upon manners and customs. The substance of 
the story is a blending of myth and history, and aptly 
illustrates what was stated § 8. 

The germ of the story is mythical. Before the con- 
querors of England left their continental home, there 
had sprung up among them the myth of a divine being, 
Beowa, who overcomes a sea-monster, Grendel, and 
then a fire-dragon ; in the latter encounter he loses his 
own life. This Beowa is only another form of Frea, the 
god of wajmth and fertility, and his death symbolizes 
the disappearance of summer at the approach of winter. 
The Germans brought the myth with them to Britain, 
and the names of Beowa and Grendel became attached 
to certain hills and lakes, e.g., Beowanham, Grenclles- 
mere. Around this mythical germ, or kernel, clustered 
subsequently the following historical incidents. 

In the early part of the 6th century, about 515, Hy- 
gelac, King of the Geats (inhabiting the modern Gota- 
land in southern Sweden), made an incursion upon the 
Erankish lands along the lower Rhine. The Erankish 
prince Theudebert met him in desperate battle, and 
routed him utterly by sea and by land. Hygelac and 
most of his followers perished, and the booty they were 
carrying off was retaken. Among the Geats was a 
young nephew of Hygelac, named Beowulf, a man of 
extraordinary strength and skill in swimming, who 



POEM OF BEOWULF. 23 

made his escape. The story is well authenticated ; it is 
narrated by Gregory of Tours in his great work, the 
Gesta Francorum. The fame of the battle and of its 
hero, Beowulf, must have spread not only among the 
Danes and Swedes but also to England, where it was 
probably commemorated in popular songs. In the 
course of time the person of the historic Beowulf be- 
came merged in that of the god Beowa, and out of this 
merging of myth and history, then, has issued our Beo- 
wulf poem. The theme was undoubtedly a favorite 
among the Angles and Saxons. Even after they were 
converted to Christianity, they preserved the substance 
of the Beowulf stories intact. But expressions savoring 
too strongly of heathenism were expunged one by one, 
and phrases and passages of a distinctively Christian or 
monkish character were interpolated. It is believed 
that the Beowulf poem, in very nearly the shape in 
which we now find it, was committed to writing, proba- 
bly in Northumbria, about the beginning of the 8th cen- 
tury. The only existing manuscript of it is one of the 
10th century, now in the British Museum. It is illegi- 
ble in several places, having been injured by fire in 1731. 
The language is West-Saxon. 

13. As now printed, the poem contains 3,184 fall 
verses (lines). It reads at first sight like one homo- 
geneous piece ; but on closer examination it reveals nu- 
merous inconsistencies and interpolations. According 
to the searching investigations of Professor Mullenhoff, 
it may be reduced to two primitive and independent 
stories: first, the fight between Beowulf and Grendel; 
second, the fight between Beowulf and the fire-dragon. 
These two stories are of equally ancient origin; but 
whether composed by one and the same poet, can not be 
made out with certainty. 

The first of the primitive stories is contained in verses 



I 



24 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

194-836; the second, in verses 2200-3184. All the 
rest of the poem is, in MiillenhofPs judgment, nothing 
but secondary matter. Even those sections of the poem 
which embody the primitive stories themselves are not 
free from interpolation. Out of a total of 3184 verses, 
only 930 can rightfully be called < original,' namely, 
490 verses for the first story, 440 for the second. 

Thus, the introduction, 1-193, is evidently a late ad- 
dition, and is a rather clumsy attempt on the part of 
some secondary verse-maker to set forth the pedigrees, 
&c, of the chief personages who figure subsequently. 
The first primitive story begins v. 194. Beowulf, thane 
of Hygelac, King of the Geats, learns of the troubles of 
Hrothgar, King of the Danes, and resolves to go to his 
relief. Hrothgar, namely, having built him a great hall, 
called Heorot, is grievously molested there by the 
nightly attacks of a water-monster, Grendel, who kills 
many of his best knights and carries off others. The 
description of the voyage of Beowulf and his com- 
panions from Geataland to the Danish land, although 
brief, is spirited. They are graciously received by 
Hrothgar. When the evening banquet is at an end, 
Hrothgar and his men retire to the inner rooms, leaving 
the great hall, which is the scene of Grendel' s ravages, 
in charge of the new-comers. They all fall asleep, ex- 
cept the leader. Grendel sallies forth as usual from his 
den in the moor, and coming to the hall tears open the 
door. Light flashes like fire from his eyes. He laughs 
to himself at the prospect of gratifying his greed of hu- 
man flesh. But .Fate, the ' weird' sister, no longer de- 
crees, literally i weaves,' that he shall carry off one of 
human kind after this night. Beowulf, awake, watches 
him. Quickly the monster falls upon a sleeping Geat 
and in an instant has torn him to pieces. The next to 
be attacked is Beowulf. But the hero, bracing himself 
on his (left) elbow, clutches Grendel with his right hand. 



POEM OF BEOWULF. 25 

The dragon finds to his dismay that he has never yet en- 
countered a man with such a grip. He tries to flee, but 
can not; he is held too firmly. Then Beowulf remem- 
bers his promise to King Hrothgar. Eising to his full 
height, he takes still firmer hold. The dragon's claw is 

CD ' CD 

crashed; again he tries to flee. The hall resounds with 
the din, the ale-cups of the Danes clatter to the grouud. 
It is a wonder that the hall does not shake to pieces; 
but it is fastened too strongly within and without with 
iron bands wrought with cunning art. Many a bench 
is overturned in the desperate fray. The listening 
Danes are filled with terror, when they hear the evil one » 
utter his cry of defeat; in the naive wording of the 
original, he yells his dreary death-song. Many a fol- 
lower of Beowulf hastens to aid with his sword. But 
the best of swords would be of no avail against Gren- 
del's enchanted mail. The combatants close in a su- 
preme effort ; the dragon's shoulder is wrenched open, 
the sinews torn asunder. Victory is with Beowulf. 
Grendel, leaving his arm behind, flees mortally wounded 
to his den. And Beowulf, in token of victory, hangs 
up the dragon's arm and claws under the broad roof. 

Heue the first story ended, according to MullenhoiF. 
It has all the characteristics of an episodic poem ; it is 
abrupt, concise, straightforward, and intensely vivid. 
For power, it is worthy of a place among the treasures 
of any people, aucient or modern. It is followed in the 
poem b} r a number of incidents and digressions, the 
chief of which are these. The next night there is a 
grand banquet, at which costly gifts are bestowed upon 
Beowulf by the grateful Hrothgar. The Daues being 
left in charge of the hall over night, are attacked by a 
second monster, Grendel's mother, who has come to 
avenge her son. She carries off' Hrothgars favorite 
councillor, Aschere. Once more Hrothgar is disconso- 
late. But Beowulf comforts him by promising to attack 



26 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

the she-monster in her den. He does so, and — after an 
even more desperate encounter — kills the mother and 
cuts off and brings back the gigantic head of the dead 
Grendel himself. Beowulf then returns to his home and 
is welcomed by Hygelac. 

All this, even including the fight between Beowulf 
and Grendel's mother, is pronounced by Mullenhoff to 
be mere secondary amplification. Bat certain discov- 
eries, made since the publication of Mullenhoff's essay, 
put the episode with Grendel's mother in a new light. 
It has been found that the story of Beowulf's victory 
over the two water-demons is contained in Icelandic, in 
the Grettis-saga, composed not much later than the year 
1250. The hero of the saga, Grettir Asmundarson, is a 
historical personage of the 11th century, an outlaw 
noted for his strength and courage. To him has been 
transferred, by the imagination of the Icelandic saga- 
men, the entire Beowa-myth in the following shape. 
Grettir, in requital for hospitality show T n him, un- 
dertakes to defend a certain house against the night- 
attack of ' trolls ' by whom it had been disturbed. At 
midnight a gigantic woman makes her appearance; the 
fight which ensues ends in his cutting off her right arm 
with his sword, and the giantess throws herself over a 
water-fall near the house and disappears. Some time 
afterwards Grettir takes wuth him the village priest, to 
help in exploring this water-fall. The priest fastens a 
long rope firmly in the bank, so that the end reaches to 
the water at the foot of the fall. Grettir plunges off the 
bank into the water, swims up to the fall, and climbing 
up some rocks succeeds in making his way into a cavern 
behind the sheet of falling water. Here he espies a 
huge giant sitting by the fire. A desperate fight ensues, 
of course, in which Grettir is again victorious. He kills 
the giant, and finds much treasure in the cave, which he 



POEM OP BEOWULF. 27 

carries off, together with the bones of two men, the 
giant's victims. 

The resemblance between this saga and the Old-English 
poem is too great to be a mere coincidence. "We may 
even say that the story of Grettir explains one or two 
points in the description of Beowulf's encounter with 
GrendePs mother, which have been quite obscure until 
now. And both the Icelandic and the English, texts 
employ one peculiar word which occurs nowhere else in 
the two languages. Everything indicates that the Ice- 
landic and the English story proceeded from a common 
original which contained both encounters. All readers 
of the Beowulf-poem will probably be glad to have the 
claims of this part to 'originality' successfully vindi- 
cated, for it embodies one of the most thrilling episodes 
— namely, where Beowulf, weary, stumbles and falls. 
The poet says, simply but powerfully : ' Then sat she 
upon the hall-guest and drew her short sword, broad, 
brown- edged ; she purposed avenging her bairn, her only 
offspring. But on his shoulder lay the woven breast- 
net, protecting the body, refusing an entrance to point 
and to edge.' Beowulf's armor is woven of links of 
steel, without any joints or seams through which a 
sword or a dagger might be thrust. 

14. The second primitive story, v. 2200-3184, con- 
tained in its original shape about 440 verses, i.e., was 
about equal in length to the first. It was probably 
equally vivid. But the interpolations and corruptions 
of the text are so numerous that it is difficult to give a 
satisfactory statement of it without going into intricate 
details. The chief points seem to be these. After the 
fall of Hygelac and his immediate family in battle, 
Beowulf becomes king. This total destruction of the 
direct line of succession is evidently a reminiscence of 
the overthrow and death of the historic Hygelac. 



28 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

Beowulf reigns fifty years with great renown. One of 
his servants, having incurred his anger, flees and hides 
himself in a cave that he accidentally discovers. The 
cave proves to be the den of a fire-dragon, who is absent 
for the moment, and is filled with rare treasures. Hop- 
ing to propitiate his master, the servant takes one of 
them, a costly drinking-cup, and returns home. Beowulf 
with eleven companions sets out to attack and plunder 
the cave. But this time he is less successful. On the 
one hand, the monster is a j^re-dragon, and therefore 
more formidable than Grendel ; on the other, Beow^ulf 
is well on in years and less vigorous. All his followers 
except one, Wiglaf, desert their master. "Wiglaf and 
Beowulf together succeed at last in killing the dragon, 
but not until Beowulf has been mortally wounded. Un- 
able to explore the cave himself, he sends Wiglaf in, 
who comes back loaded with vessels of gold and silver. 
Making his dying speech, Beowulf nominates Wiglaf 
his successor. The other knights returning, Wiglaf up- 
braids them bitterly with cowardice, and bids them pre- 
pare for troublous times. Now that their great king is 
gone, their enemies, the Franks and the Frisians, will 
not spare them. This passage is doubtless a post-factum 
prophecy of the breaking-up of the power of the historic 
Geats. The whole folk is then convened. The corpse 
of the hero is laid upon a stately pyre, the smoke of 
which ascends to heaven amid universal weeping and 
wailing. 

Next to the Nibelun gen-lied, the poem of Beow T ulf has 
received the most attention from scholars. Editions of 
it are numerous; it has been translated into English 
prose by Kemble, and into modern German alliteration 
by Grein. Yet despite all such efforts, much of the 
poem still remains and will probably always remain ob- 
scure. Purely descriptive and narrative passages do not 
offer serious difficulty. But the genealogies, the epic 



ETNNSBURG, WALDERE, WiDSiTH. 29 

'asides,' and the passages "where an originally heathen 
conception or allusion has been effaced to make room 
for some monkish moralizing, are enough to puzzle the 
wits and weary the patience of the best scholars. 

15. Three other heroic poems (or fragments) remain 
to be mentioned. The Fight of Finnsburg commemorates 
an episode which is alluded to in the Beowulf-poem. 
Sixty Danes with their leaders, Hnaef and Hengest, while 
lodged in the castle of Finn, King of the Frisians, are 
treacherously attacked by their host. Huaef falls, but 
the Danes hold out for live days, when a truce is made. 
But it is not kept long. The fighting is renewed and 
Hengest and Finn both perish. The beginning of the 
piece is very graphic in its abruptness; it describes the 
first onslaught. Then exclaimed the king (Hengest), 
young in battle : That is not the dawn coming from the 
east, neither is it the flight of a dragon, nor the blaze of 
the horns of the hall. They are coming to surprise us. 
The birds are singing, the cricket chirps, the shields ring, 
shield answers to arrow. ]S~ow the full moon shineth be- 
hind clouds, now start up deeds of woe that the hate of 
this folk is minded to do. But arouse yon, my warriors, 
lift up your hamls, be mindful of your might, fight in 
the front, be heroes ! 

The fragment called Waldere, in High German ' Wal- 
ter,' is connected with the well known continental epic' 
of Walther of Aquitaine, preserved in a Latin-hexameter 
version of the 10th century. Walther is eloping with 
his bride, Hildegund, from the court of Attila, King of 
the Huns, when he is intercepted and attacked by Hagen 
and Gunther (characters that reappear in another form 
in the Nibelangenlied). The English Waldere proves that 
the conquerors of Britain were familiar with the cycle of 
Theoderic of Bern (Verona). 

The most interesting of these minor pieces is the one 
called Widstth, or 'Traveler' (literally ' wide-farer '). 



30 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

Iii composition it is probably the oldest extant specimen 
of Anglo-Saxon verse. The chief person, Widsith, is a 
type of the restless, roaming poet-knight of those early 
days, singing of his wanderings. He tells of Angles and 
Saxons, Goths, Swabians, Langobards, and Burgnndians. 
What makes the poem peculiarly interesting is that it 
speaks of many of these peoples, notably the Angles, as 
still in their early homes before setting out on their mi- 
gration over the Roman empire. 

Of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry in general it is to be 
observed that its personages and events all antedate the 
conquest of Britain. Nowhere do we find an allusion to 
this great event, or to the exploits by which it must have 
been attended. In other words, although the poems 
themselves were put into shape on English soil, the 
themes must have been brought from the continent. 
This phenomenon has not yet been sufficiently accounted 
for. Probably we shall never be able to account for it, 
unless manuscripts be discovered containing poems now 
unknown. 



CHAPTER V. 

CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY — BEDE, ALDHELM, BONIFACE. 

16. The conversion of the Angles and Saxons to 
Christianity is the first great event in their history, our 
knowledge of which rests on a satisfactory basis. 

It is the office of the political and ecclesiastical histo- 
rian to discuss this movement in its details. But the his- 
torian of our literature is called upon to show at least 
how the conversion affected the habits of thought of the 
people, and gave to it new motives, new hopes and fears, 
new standards of right and wrong, and new forms of ex- 
pression. 



BRITISH, IRISH, SCOTCH CHURCH. 31 

The Keltic inhabitants of England had accepted Chris- 
tianity in the times of the Romans. Ireland was con- 
verted in the 5th century. The church of Ireland be- 
came in the course of the 6th and 7th centuries conspic- 
uous for zeal and learning. Among its leaders may be 
mentioned Colli mba, founder of the celebrated monastery 
of Iona (one of the Hebrides) ; Gallus, founder of the 
still more celebrated monastery of St. Gall (Switzerland), 
and Colambanus, founder of Bobbio (Piedmont). But 
the Irish church was viewed with some jealousy and 
mistrust by the general Western church. It was charged 
with certain quasi heretical tenets, and with want of suf- 
ficient deference to the supremacy of the pope. As to 
the Britains, although they had been converted as early 
as the 3d century, we know but little of their church, 
and that little does not inspire respect. It seems to have 
been a prey to ecclesiastical and political dissensions ; 
the British rulers were given up to intrigues and degrad- 
ing vices. Yet, feeble as it was, the British church 
might have developed a healthier life, bad it not been 
hopelessly ruined, together with the British people, by 
the Anglo-Saxon conquest. At the end of the 6th cen- 
tury a line drawn due south from Abercorn (near Edin- 
burgh) to Weymouth (in Dorsetshire), would have repre- 
sented not unfairly the two great divisions of the island. 
All to the east, Germanic and heathen ; all to the west, 
Keltic and Christian, in name at least. The Keltic in- 
habitants of the greater part of Scotland had been con- 
verted in the 6th century by missionaries from Ireland. 

The mission of converting the Angles and Saxons was 
conducted from two sides simultaneously: from the 
north, by Irish-Scotch missionaries ; from the south, by 
missionaries sent direct from Rome. In the early part 
of the year 597, Augustine and his companions landed on 
the shores of Kent. They had been sent by the then pope, 
Gregory the Great. Ethelberht, ruler of Kent, accepted 



32 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

the new doctrine. Canterbury became the center of the 
Roman Catholic propaganda, and Augustine was conse- 
crated first archbishop. On the north the district of 
Northumbria was overrun by missionaries from Iona, 
chief among whom was the celebrated Aidan. The 
monastery of Lindisfarn (subsequently called Holy Isle), 
not far from the mouth of the Tweed, became the centre 
of the northern propaganda. The middle portion of the 
country, Mercia, under King Penda, held out the longest. 
But Penda's defeat by Oswi, King of Northumbria, in 
655, sealed the fate of heathenism. Henceforth there 
was but one God acknowledged in England, Scotland, 
Wales, and Ireland, but one church, and but one faith. 
The worship of Thor and of Othin once broken, its frag- 
ments were soon swept away, or lingered only as idle, 
harmless superstitions among the uneducated lower 
classes. The conversion was not only rapid, but thor- 
ough ; so thorough, indeed, that in little more than a 
hundred years, say about the beginning of the 8th cen- 
tury, England became the foremost branch of the church 
in western Europe. The prestige and influence of the 
Irish church was already on the decline. For this there 
were several reasons. The Irish princes were at odds 
among themselves, and the island became a prey to Nor- 
wegian and Danish pirates. 

17. During the 8th and 9th centuries the doctrines of 
the Roman Catholic Church became more and more sys- 
tematized and its organization perfected. In fact it 
ceased to be for the most part a missionary church, and 
assumed gradually the character of a highly organized 
corporation for the management of public and private 
morals, not infrequently also of politics. The aim of the 
church, at least in western Europe, was steadily fixed 
upon the concentration of its power in the hands of the 
pope, and upon the obliteration of everything that sa- 



POLICY OF THE CHURCH. 66 

vored of heresy, schism, and national or local dissent. 
Italy, Spain, France, Western Germany, and the British 
Isles were made distinctively Eonian-Catholic. 

Not even the power of the church could eradicate race- 
hatred. In Great Britain, for instance, the Saxon and 
the Kelt continued to look upon each other as foes. The 
process of conquering and Germanizing the surviving 
Britons in western and southwestern England and in 
Wales went on for centuries. In the north the Gaels 
were crowded farther and farther hack into the High- 
lands. Yet, as Christians, all the races and inhahitants 
of the British Isles acknowledged allegiance to Rome 
and in so far w^ere on a footing of equality. Moreover, 
thej T were united hy at least one bond, viz., the Latin 
church-ritual. To us in the 19th century this may not 
seem much. But it behooves us to do justice to the past. 
Whatever views we may hold of the church of Eome as 
it now is, we must not forget that it was the mainstay of 
society and of culture from the 3d century to the 13th. 
It did what no other power could have done, it taught 
the peoples of Europe that they were brothers before 
God. Its methods and practices may not seem to us per- 
fectly proper. Bat it never for an instant lost sight of 
its mission, it never forgot that it was the divinely ap- 
pointed arbiter between king and king, between nation 
and nation. It summoned rulers and subjects before its 
tribunal and made them understand that there were such 
things as international justice and international sympa- 
thies. From the 3d century to the 13th, then, the work 
of the church was one of beneficence. But from the 
13th century on, we observe symptoms of discontent, 
which culminated in the Protestant Reformation of the 
16th century. 

It does not seem to have cost the Anglo-Saxon people 
much of a struggle to give up their heathen gods. 
What opposition there was, came chiefly from a few 



34 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

princes who distrusted the missionaries because they 
were foreigners. The gods of Germanic mythology 
were too crude and vague to maintain themselves before 
the simplicity and unity of the Christian creed. Be- 
sides, the old mythology offered no well developed sys- 
tem of ethics. It recognized little virtue beyond brute 
force and brute valor. It was incapable of suggesting 
high ideals of daily life. To abjure Othin and worship 
Christ, then, was a comparatively slight task. The 
difficulty lay on the other side, in adopting the ritual. 
The early Britons had accepted Roman priests and a 
Latin ritual as a matter of course, for Latin was the 
language of their military rulers. But the Angles and 
Saxons recognized no such supremacy. Latin was to 
them a wholly foreign tongue, and — unlike the Britons 
— they had never had a separate class of priests. They 
were called upon not only to worship a new God, but to 
worship him publicly in a language which they could 
not speak nor even understand, and to consent to the 
establishment of a close corporation of priests, of whom 
many, if not most, were at the outset foreigners. Yet 
hierarchy and ritual were matters in which the church 
could not afford to make concessions. They were estab- 
lished. Precisely in what way and with what prompt- 
ness, we are unable to ascertain. All we can say is that 
through the adoption of Christianity Latin became once 
more a language of England. It was the sole acknowl- 
edged and official language of the church in all matters 
of doctrine and ritual, and in intercourse between Eng- 
land and the papal see. As the church was in those 
days the sole depository of learning, Latin became also 
the vehicle of imparting knowledge. All the teachers 
were members of the clergy or of religious orders, and 
all the schools were cathedral or cloister-schools. Text- 
books were in Latin, and most of the pupils were candi- 
dates for the priesthood. Throughout the Middle Ages 



LATIN RE-ESTABLISHED IN ENGLAND. 35 

the church claimed jurisdiction in cases relating to mar- 
riage and divorce, parentage, church property, and the 
validity of oaths. Bishops exercised the functions of 
judges, and in their courts, officers and counsel were ec- 
clesiastics. Bulls of the pope and decrees of the ecu- 
menical councils, together with the decisions of the 
pope's court of appeals, supplied the largest share of the 
ecclesiastical law and rule of procedure. As a matter 
of course, Latin was the language used in these episco- 
pal courts. What has heen said of England will apply 
with even greater force to the rest of Europe. We can 
watch this building-up of an elaborate system of church 
jurisprudence simultaneously all over Europe, until it 
assumed definite shape in the Corpus Juris Canonici. 
An example being thus set by the church, we need not 
be surprised to see the political rulers of England enact- 
ing and codifying their secular laws — purely Germanic 
in character — in a Latin form. Deeds for the convey- 
ance and leasing of property, royal edicts, municipal 
charters, and other private and public documents were 
drawn up in Latin. 

The details of this change may be left to the political 
historian ; its general significance for the history of our 
literature may be summed up in a few words. Such 
Avholesale use of a foreign idiom drew a sharp dividing 
line, which had never before existed, between the learned 
and the unlearned. On the one side there was a small 
class of secular and clerical dignitaries and officials ; on 
the other, the great mass of peasants and artizans. 
Both classes spoke, in every-day matters, the vernacular. 
But the former class had a jargon all to itself, a monkish 
book-Latin, of which the latter class had no understand- 
ing. Thus Latin came to be regarded as more learned, 
more elegant, more literary. The folk- speech, even at 
its best, could not claim equality ; it was always more 
or less open to the charge of being vulgar. This state 



36 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

of opinion lasted in England until the Reformation in 
the 16th century, and even later. Whoever wished to 
write as a scholar for scholars must perforce write in 
Latin. English might he good enough for peasants, 
working-men, soldiers, even for writers of verse and 
popular tales, but it was not good enough for science. 
Lord Bacon evidently thought that it was not in the 
17th century. 

This prevalence of Latin was not an unmixed evil. It 
established an international language, as the church had 
established an international code of manners and morals. 
Men of letters of different countries could converse and 
correspond with one another. The evil lay chiefly in its 
retarding the growth of the popular tongue. The 
church everywhere absorbed the best talents, and the 
folk-speech was left to be cultivated by men of inferior 
ability. Herein England will compare most favorably 
with continental nations, at least in the times anterior to 
the Norman Conquest. Kings and bishops in England 
encouraged the translation of useful works from Latin 
into English, and also the composition of religious 
pieces in English. The result was that the vernacular 
literature of England from 750 to 1050 exceeded in vol- 
ume and importance that of France and that of Ger- 
many. 

18. It was stated, near the close of § 5, that English 
thought and speech, even in the earlier heathen period, 
was marked by a tone of soberness or sadness. This 
tone was confirmed and deepened by the conversion to 
Christianity. In becoming Christians, the Angles and 
Saxons, it is true, did not immediately cease to be pug- 
nacious. There were still feuds enough between neigh- 
bor and neighbor, between prince and prince. The so- 
called Heptarchy might almost be called a period of an- 
archy. But as time wore on, the supreme power was 



GENERAL FEATURES OF CHRISTIAN POETRY. 37 

gradually concentrated in the royal family of Wessex. 
The habits of the folk became peaceful ; so peaceful, in 
fact, that the land was barely able to defend itself from 
the Danes. In proportion, then, as the primitive war- 
like zeal of the folk abated, its tendency to melancholy 
manifested itself more strongly in its literature. The 
disposition assumes so many shapes that it is impossible 
to characterize it in a single word. 'Melancholy' is 
perhaps too strong. AYe may call it 'brooding,' or 
' yearning,' or ' plaintive.' A musician would probably 
speak of the religious poetry (about to be mentioned) as 
composed in the minor key. ]^~ot only is its aim didactic — 
religious poetry can scarcely be otherwise — but it dwells 
upon the gentle and contemplative moods of the soul, 
rather than upon the impassioned. Hence it prefers 
seutiments and reflections to deeds. If we compare, for 
instance, our early versions of the legends of the saints 
with the Latin originals from which they were adapted, 
we shall perceive that the English poet has usually 
abridged the action of the story and sketched to exces- 
sive length those passages in which the saint gives vent 
to his feelings. The earliest poems, e.g., the metrical 
paraphrase of Genesis, § 21, are comparatively free from 
such diffuseness. But the later we come down, the more 
of it we shall find. And hand in hand with sentiment- 
ality of tone goes a fondness for such rhetorical forms 
as Visions, Dreams, Allegories, and the like. Medieval 
literature in general exhibits a great variety of visions 
and allegories, written by ecclesiastics of all nations. 
But nowhere does this sort of writing appear to have 
taken such firm hold of the popular imagination as in 
England. Other European nations, e.g., France and 
Germany, have produced allegorical and diffusely didactic 
poets ; but Englaud alone pays them peculiar honor. 
The taste, once acquired, has withstood the Korman 
Conquest, the Italian Renaissance, and the Protestant 



38 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

Reformation, and subsists at the present day. We find, 
in the 14th century, the author of Piers Plowman divid- 
ing the honors with Chaucer; in the 16th, the Faery 
Queen evershadows every rival ; in the 17th, Pilgrim's 
Progress has no rival but Paradise Lost. In the 18th 
century no one poet predominates; and the acknowl- 
edged autocrat of letters is Dr. Johnson, not a poet at 
all but a moral philosopher. In our own time we ob- 
serve no less a critic than Matthew Arnold asserting that 
our greatest poet after Shakespeare and Milton is Words- 
worth. Many, perhaps most, of us will dissent from 
this. Yet the mere utterance of the opinion is signifi- 
cant; it reveals the innate bias of the English mind, in- 
fluencing, some of us would say, warping the judgment 
of our most cultured critic. 

Extreme soberness of tone was not the only fault of 
our pre-Norman literature. It was Jacking in color, in 
grace, in ability to catch the more delicate play of 
thought and character. And it was also lacking in 
what is called the ' historic sense.' Having led for cen- 
turies a life of comparative isolation, the inhabitants of 
England were, by the middle of the 11th century, in 
danger of vegetating in insular exclusiveness. They 
took no direct active part in the general movement of 
continental politics. They were absorbed in domestic 
affairs, and seemed to be disengaging themselves little 
by little from the great family of nations. In these two 
respects the changes wrought by the Norman Conquest 
w r ere not merely salutary but even necessary. For the 
Normans brought with them from France a fondness for 
light literature, and also a disposition to enter into for- 
eign politics and to treat the facts and phases of politi- 
cal life in a spirit of philosophic inquiry. 

19, The chief seat of the activity of the church in 
the 8th century was in Northumbria, although the 



BEDE. 39 

archbishop of Canterbury was primate of England. 
Archbishop Theodore and Abbot Hadrian founded the 
celebrated cloister-school of Canterbury near the end of 
the 7th century. One of the pupils of the school, Aid- 
helm, subsequently bishop of Sherborn, directed the 
studies in the school of Malrnesbury, in TTessex. About 
this time Benedict Biscop established the schools of 
Wearmouth and Yarrow, in Xorthumbria, which were 
soon to overshadow all the others. Bede, the most illus- 
trious name in the annals of the early English church, 
was born at TTearmouth in 672, and was educated, partly 
there, partly at Yarrow. His whole life was passed in 
these two schools, in learning, teaching, and preaching. 
He never rose to a higher rank than that of simple 
priest. He died, 735, at the age of 62, with the well 
earned reputation of being the most learned man of his 
times. His life was in the ordinary sense uneventful. 
To quote his own words: "I spent my whole life in the 
same monastery, and while attentive to the rules of my 
order and the service of the church, my constant pleas- 
ure lay in teaching, in learning, or in writing." Yet his 
fame was European ; more than any other one man 
probably did he influence the literature of the church. 
His scholars numbered upwards of 600, yet he found 
time to compose forty-five treatises. The founders 
of the monastery having provided a tolerably good li- 
brary of Latin manuscripts, he had an opportunity of 
acquiring a taste for Cicero and Seneca, Ovid and Lucre- 
tius. From the followers of Archbishop Theodore of 
Canterbury, who was a Greek of Tarsos, he even ac- 
quired some knowledge of the Greek language, which 
was a very rare accomplishment in those days. The en- 
cyclopedic knowledge which he concentrated in himself 
and imparted freely to his pupils, or else stored up in 
his writings, is justly regarded as the foundation of 
scholarship in England. 



40 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

~No less conspicuous than his learning was his per- 
sonal character. It was so honorable and so attractive 
that it won for him the designation of "Venerable 
Bede." There is nothing brighter in the early history 
of England than the sight of this simple, sweet-tempered 
priest, filled with love for his fellow-men, gifted with an 
intelligence far ahead of his times, toiling on patiently 
and modestly, year after year, in the least obtrusive of 
vocations. 

Bede was fond of his mother-tongue and its verse. 
Lying on his death- bed he ejaculated, in alliterative 
lines : Before the inevitable journey no thought can 
there be more prudent than that man must consider, 
before his departure, what of good or of evil may be 
adjudged to his soul after the day of death. Whether 
the lines were of his own composition or not, is left un- 
decided in the account of his death, written by his friend 
and disciple, Cuthbert. The same account adds that on 
the very day of his death he was at work upon a trans- 
lation of the gospel of John into English, dictating to 
an amanuensis. Towards evening the young scribe 
said: "There is yet one more sentence." "Write 
quickly," replied the dying man. "It is finished now, 
at last." "You speak truth," said the master, "all is 
finished." And his spirit passed away, singing the Glo- 
ria in Excelsis. 

None of Bede's writings in the vernacular have been 
preserved ; at least, none in an independent shape, for it 
is possible that the above-mentioned rendering of the 
fourth gospel may have been recast subsequently and 
merged in the general collection of gospel-translations, 
see § 28. The works of Becle that we possess are in 
Latin. Those which treat of biblical exegesis and dog- 
matic theology may be passed over here. But there is 
one of his works which will interest directly every 
English-speaking man, viz., his Historia Ecclesiae Gentis 



bede's histokia. 41 

Anglonim, a moderate-sized volume narrating the story 
of the conversion of the Angles and Saxons. Its style 
is clear, concise, forcible, and remarkably elegant for the 
8th century. It is the chief, almost the only, source of 
our knowledge of the period to which it relates, and it 
is to this day a very readable book. The simplicity and 
earnestness of the author are stamped on every page. 
But not all the parts of the work are of equal value. It 
is divided into five books. The first twenty-two chap- 
ters of Book I give a brief resume of the history of the 
island from the invasion by Julius Caesar down to the 
coming of Augustine in 597. They are a mixture of 
fact and fable, the latter element predominating. The 
facts they contain are of no value to us, because our 
knowledge of them is now derived from independent 
and better sources. Bede borrowed most of his state- 
ments concerning the Romans from Orosius, see § 26. 
His account of the Britons and the Anglo-Saxon con- 
quest is based upon a Latin treatise, usually called Gil- 
das, after its supposed author. This Gildas is of such 
questionable antecedents that we can put no faith in it. 
Bede's real work begins with the twenty-third chapter. 
His account of the mission of Augustine and all that 
follows is undoubtedly authentic. It was based upon 
documents then existing in England, and upon copies of 
papal documents, made for him by one of his friends in 
the archives at Rome. The work ends with a survey of 
the organization of the English church in the year 731, 
and a list of the author's writings. A later hand has 
appended a meagre list of church events, names of bish- 
ops, &c, year by year, from 731-766. At the end of one 
of the manuscripts of the Historia are to be found the 
Northumbrian verses by Caedmon, mentioned § 11, 20. 
Although Bede's work is in the main genuine history, 
it is not wholly free from the superstitions in vogue in 
the Middle Ages. Even Books IV and V, which treat 



42 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

of persons and events contemporary with or just prior to 
Becle himself, are not wanting in 'visions' and ' won- 
ders.' It is worthy of note that the story of Caedmon. 
see § 20, is preceded and followed in Book IV by other 
stories equally marvelous. 

One of Bede's contemporaries lias been already men- 
tioned, Aklhelm, Bishop of Sherborn and teacher in the 
school at Malmesbnry. Aklhelm lived from about 650 
to 709. His reputation for learning was inferior only to 
that of Bede. Some of his works are in prose, others in 
verse ; they are all of a religious nature except one, a 
collection of one hundred riddles, imitated from the rid- 
dles of Symposius, a late Latin writer of the 4th or 5th 
century. Although composed chiefly for entertainment, 
Aldhelm's riddles are rather serious in tone. They are 
written in various metres, having been designed by their 
author to serve as illustrations of Latin prosody. For 
the connection between them and the English riddles of 
Cynewulf, see § 23. 

Aldhelm is said to have been an excellent poet in his 
mother-tongue, but none of his English pieces have been 
preserved. By way of compensation we find allitera- 
tion in many of his Latin verses. He was also fond of dis- 
playing his knowledge of Greek by interlarding his Latin 
with phrases evidently reproduced from Greek idioms. 
This trait of pedantry is worth noting; it shows how 
zealously Greek was studied at that early day in England, 
and it will moreover prepare us for recognizing the phe- 
nomenon that some of the legendary poems of the 8th, 
9th, or 10th centuries, in the vernacular of England, 
see § 25, were based upon primitive Greek versions and 
not upon secondary Latin ones. 

Besides the great schools already mentioned, there was 
one scarcely less noted, at York. Among the teachers here 
was Bede's young friend Ecgberht. And in this school was 
trained the celebrated Alcnin, who afterwards removed 



BONIFACE. 43 

to France and became the bosom friend and adviser of 
Charlemagne, and his assistant in the great plan of re- 
forming education throughout Europe. Another famous 
Englishman was Winfrid, better known by his Latin 
name of St. Boniface. After teaching in several schools 
in his native country, he entered upon his missionary 
labors in Bavaria, Thuringia, Hesse, Saxony, and Fries- 
land. In 732 he was consecrated archbishop and primate 
of Germany. He established the bishoprics of Ratisbon, 
Erfurt, Paderborn, Wurzburg, Salzburg, and others, and 
also the famous abbey of Fulda. It was he who, in 752, 
at the deposition of Chilperic, the last of the Merowings, 
consecrated his deposer, Pepin the Short, King of the 
Frauks. The subsequent development of the English 
church is a matter of general history. Enough has been 
said in this place to illustrate the promptness and thor- 
oughness of the conversion. 



CHAPTER VI. 

CHRISTIAN POETRY — CAEDM0N — GENESIS, EXODUS, DANIEL. 

20. The Christian poetry of early England is scarcely 
less interesting than the heathen ; it is much more abund- 
ant, and is easier to interpret. Like the heathen poetry, 
it is written in alliterative verse. For the survival of 
heathen notions, see § 6. For the creeping-in of rime, 
see § 9, § 30. The poets were sometimes monks, some- 
times laymen. We have grounds for suspecting that 
more than one worldly singer, growing weary of wander- 
ing and fighting, found refuge and rest within the 
cloister- walls and sang there of Moses and Abraham as 
he had formerly sung of Theoderic and Wieland. 

First in interest, probably also in time, is the poem 



44 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

called Genesis. It is contained in the Ms. Jim i an XL, of 
the Bodleian library, Oxford, together with three others, 
called respectively Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan. 
All four poems were formerly ascribed to one author, 
namely Caedmon. But at present scholars are agreed 
npon the following points. First, that Christ and Satan 
is mnch later, both in penmanship and style, than the 
other three, and must be assigned to a different era. 
Second, that Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, although writ- 
ten in the manuscript by one and the same scribe, ex- 
hibit too much diversity of style and language to be the 
work of the same author. The authorship of Exodus 
and Daniel is generally conceded to be unknown. The 
only point not yet definitively settled is the authorship 
of Genesis. 

The following story is told by Bede, in his Historia, 
Bk. IV, ch. 24. In the latter part of the 7th century 
(not many years, therefore, before the birth of Bede him- 
self) there lived near the cloister of Streoneshalh ^better 
known by the subsequent Danish name Whitby) in 
Nbrthumbria, a man, w T ell on in years, named Caedmon, 
The gift of song had been denied him, so that, when at 
table the harp was passed to him in turn, he was wont 
to retire in shame. One evening, after being thus dis- 
graced, he fell asleep in the stable of which he had 
charge. Then appeared to him in his dream a vision, 
and a voice called upon him to sing of the beginning of 
created things. So he sang in his dream a song in praise 
of the Lord, thus: £Tow shall we laud the author of 
heaven, the might of the creator and his counsel, the 
deeds of the father of glory, how he, the eternal God, 
was the author of all wonders, who first made for the 
children of men heaven for a roof, he the holy creator, 
and afterwards established the middle region, the earth, 
for men, the almighty Lord. Upon awaking, Caedmon 
repeated this and added much thereto. The news of the 



CAEDMON. 



45 



wonder soon spread to the cloister, where he was called 
upon to give specimens of his newly acquired gift. The 
abbess Hild received him into the cloister and made her 
learned men recite the bible story to him. Whatever 
they told him, he elaborated in his mind and turned it 
into glorious songs, so that his teachers soon became his 
listeners And thus, says Bede, he sang of the creation 
of the world and the origin of the human race, and the 
whole story of Genesis; of the Exodus of the children 
of Israel from Egypt and their entry into the promised 
land; of many other sacred stories; of the incarnation 
of our Lord, his sufferings, resurrection, and ascension ; 
of the coming of the Holy Ghost and the preaching of 
the apostles; of the terrors of the last judgment and the 
pangs of hell and the bliss of heaven. Also many other 
songs of God's grace and God's judgments, and in them 
all he strove to lead men from sin and incite them to 
virtue. 

Professor ten Brink, one of the soundest judges of 
our early literature, is disposed to concede some basis of 
fact to this story, but observes shrewdly that it implies 
an extraordinarily wide range of poetic powers and ac- 
tivity. If we take Bede's words literally, this Caedmon 
must have been not only an epic but a lyric and a di- 
dactic poet of the highest order, and his productions 
must have comprised every subject and style of compo- 
sition in the whole range of our religious poetry. Per- 
haps we are to regard Bede's Caeclmon (like Widsith, § 
15) as a typical rather than a real character. He seems 
to stand for the entire class of humble but zealous con- 
verts. Besides, we must remember that the story of 
Caedmon is not the only wonder that Bede tells in this 
connection, see § 19. 

Bede says that he gives only the < substance ' of Caed- 
mon's dream-song, in Latin prose, beginning thus: 
Nunc laudare debemus auctorem regni coelestis, &c. King 



46 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

Alfred, in his West-Saxon translation of Bede's Historia, 
see § 26, when he comes to this point, uses the following 
language : Then he (Caedmon) began straightway to 
sing these words and verses, which he had never heard, 
the 6 order ' of which is : 

Nu we sceolon herian heofonrices weard, 
Metodes mihte ond his modgethonc, 

In all, nine alliterative full lines, corresponding exactly 
to Bede's Latin prose. 

At the end of one of the Latin MSS. of Bede are 
found nine lines in the vernacular, beginning thus : 

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard, 
Metudaes maecti end his modgedanc, 

The difference between the two sets of verse is merely 
one of dialect. King Alfred's passage is in Wessex, the 
other in Northumbrian, bat otherwise the two passages 
agree absolutely. 

But the beginning of the Junian Genesis (which is 
also in Wessex dialect) is different, and is worded thus : 

Us is riht micel thaet we rodera weard, 
Wereda wuldorcining wordum herigen 
Modum lufien : he is maegna sped, 
&c, &c. 

Which maybe rendered: It is our bounden duty that 
we the lord of glory, the wonder-king of peoples, with 
our words should praise, with our hearts should love ; 
he is the promoter of strength, &c. 

The question naturally suggests itself: In what rela- 
tion do the Latin prose lines in the text of Bede, the 
Northumbrian verses appended to Bede, and King Al- 
fred's verses stand to one another, and how are they all 
three related to the poem of Genesis ? 

The problem is complicated, and some of the points 



GENESIS. 47 

are still in dispute. But opinion seems to be gradually 
settling down to these conclusions: 1. That the Latin 
MS. of Bede is of the earl}' part of the 8th century, say 
737. Consequently it was penned almost immediately 
after Bede's death. 2. That the metrical fragment in 
Northumbrian appended to this MS. is of the same date 
as the body of the MS. 3. That Bede's Latin 'nunc 
laudare debemus,' &c, is translated from the Northum- 
brian. 4. That King Alfred's verses are merely a later 
Wessex form of the same Northumbrian. We have in 
this Northumbrian fragment, then, the remains of a very 
old poem of the 7th century, which nothing prevents us 
from ascribing to the Caedmon of whom Bede writes. 
The further point, viz., the relation between the North- 
umbrian fragment and the Junian Genesis is not yet 
fully cleared up. Probably we shall be safe in taking a 
middle position. We may assert, on the one hand, that 
the Junian Genesis is not a direct Wessex version of the 
Northumbrian!, poem of which the Bede MS. has pre- 
served a fragment. On the other hand, we may admit 
that the substance of the early Northumbrian poem has 
been embodied in the Junian Genesis. According to 
Professor ten Brink, the style of Genesis gives unmis- 
takable evidence of high antiquity. It suggests an art 
of versification in its infancy, not on the decline. 

21, Genesis, as we have it in the Junian MS., is a 
poem of 2935 full verses. Originally it must have been 
much longer, for there are six large gaps in the MS., and 
the narrative ends abruptly at the sacrifice of Isaac. 
The MS. is of the 10th century, but the language is that 
of the 9th, if not earlier. 

We have to distinguish in the poem two portions of 
unequal length and dissimilar character. Namely, 
verses 245 to 851 are an interpolation. See § 5. Pro- 
fessor Sievers, who established this fact in the year 1875, 



48 ANGLO-SAXON LITEKATURE. 

regards the interpolated passage as an English transla- 
tion from an Old-Saxon poem on the same subject, now 
lost, and composed in the latter half of the 9th century, 
probably by the author of the famous Old- Saxon He- 
Hand. Professor ten Brink has given to the interpolated 
passage the title of Younger Genesis, and to the older 
and main portion the title of Elder Genesis. 

The poem opens with an invocation to God, and pro- 
ceeds to sing of the bliss of the angels in heaven and the 
rebellion and fall of the angels. These notions concern- 
ing the ten orders of angels and the rebellion of Lucifer 
are wholly foreign to the bible- text, and are derived from 
the writings of Gregory the Great and the compendium 
made by Isidor from the writings of Gregory and St. 
Augustine. Thej recur with endless variation ail 
through medieval literature, see § 24. The poem goes 
on to state that after the bad angels have been thrust 
out of heaven and peace restored, the Lord is moved 
with sorrow at the sight of so many vacant seats. By 
way of compensation he proceeds to create earth and 
man. The description of the creation conforms strictly 
to the bible, except that the two accounts of man's crea- 
tion (Gen. i. 26 ; ii. 7) are thrown into one. Some of 
the passages are extremely forcible. In describing the 
creation of light, the poet bursts forth : 

The earth was yet, 
The grass all un green; the sea covered 
By swarthy night far and wide, 
The wan waves. Then came beaming in glory 
The spirit of heaven's warder borne o'er the waves 
With mighty blessing. The lord of the angels, 
The giver of life, bade the light come forth 
Over the wide ground ; quickly was obeyed 
The high king's behest. Holy light 
Was over the wastes, as the worker commanded. 

The first part of the Elder Genesis stops at v. 245, with 
the naming of the four rivers of Paradise, Gen. ii. 14. 



YOUNGER GENESIS. 49 

Passing over the Younger- Genesis interpolation for the 
present, we find the elder poem resuming the story at 
the point where the Lord calls to Adam in Paradise just 
after Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit, 
Gen. iii. 9. The poet adheres closely to the text. Occa- 
sionally he abridges a pedigree; occasionally, on the 
other hand, he amplifies a passage in accordance with 
Old-German notions. Thus his description of the Hood, 
although not much longer than that in the original, 
creates the impression that it must have been adapted 
to the experience of a sea-faring people. The flood be- 
comes more of a tempest. 

The Younger- Genesis interpolation is interesting in 
more than one respect. It repeats, but in a much fuller 
form, the fall of the angels, and introduces the tempta- 
tion and fall of man. It describes the fallen angels as 
they lie bound in the fire of the bottomless pit. Their 
leader, Satan, delivers a speech in which he declares his 
unconquered hate and announces his intention to ruin 
the newly created race of man. The resemblance be- 
tween this Old-English Satan and Milton's archfiend is 
striking. But the most significant trait in the interpo- 
lated passage is the peculiar character it gives to the 
temptation. In the bible and in all the ecclesiastical 
literature of the middle ages Adam and Eve are repre- 
sented as overcome by the evil spirit's appeal to their 
idle curiosity or some such improper feeling. 

Here, the tempter is a veritable father of lies. He an- 
nounces himself as a messenger sent from God to com- 
mand them to eat of the tree of knowledge, and threatens 
them with divine wrath if they refuse. This of course 
places the conduct of our first parents in a better light; 
it diminishes their guilt, if it does not remove it alto- 
gether. It is contrary to the rigorous doctrine of the 
medevial church, which sought to enhance its own 
efficacy by deepening man's sinfulness. The only work 



50 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

in which we find a like disposition to touch lightly upon 
sin and the fall is in the Old-Saxon poem of the Heliand, 
ahove mentioned. We may account for such a disposi- 
tion by assuming that the Old-Saxons, who had just been 
forcibly converted to Christianity by Charlemagne, were 
unwilling to accept the doctrine of total depravity be- 
cause it seemed to them an unmanly belief. 

22. The next poem in the Junian Ms. is called 
Exodus. This title is too extensive for the matter, 
which does not include all the events in the biblical 
Exodus, but merely the march of the children of Israel 
through the Bed Sea and the destruction of the Egyptian 
army. It is only 589 verses long ; at verse 445 there is 
a gap of two pages in the ms. According to Professor 
ten Brink, the author must have been an epic singer 
turned bible-poet and retaining his old love for heroes 
and w r eapons. Nowhere in the Christian poetry is the love 
of fighting so marked. This is all the more striking as 
the narrative does not have any battle to describe, but 
can merely tell of preparations for battle and the great 
danger threatening the Hebrews. The descriptions are 
more detailed than in Genesis, more imaginative, and 
more poetical. 

The third poem, Daniel, contains 765 verses ; there is 
one considerable gap in the ms. Like Exodus, it does 
not give all the contents of the biblical book ; it ends 
abruptly at Dan v. 22, in the midst of the prophet's 
interpretation of Belshazzar's dream. It selects only 
important incidents, especially such as inculcate submis- 
sion to God and trust in him, and distrust of one's own 
powers. The style is simpler and less graphic than that 
of Exodus. i 

The last poem of this ms., usually called Christ and 
Satan, is not one homogeneous piece, but is a mere col- 
lection, carelessly put together, of fragments of three 



MINOR POEMS. 51 

separate poems, treating respectively of the pangs of the 
Fallen Angels. Christ's Descent into Hell and Ascension, 
and Christ's Temptation. All three fragments are evi- 
dently much later in date than Genesis, Exodus, and 
Daniel, and also much inferior. 

Not much if any later than Exodus and Daniel are 
various short pieces, e.g. a metrical paraphrase of the 
50th psalm (in the Kentish dialect), a poem on the Day 
of Judgment, descriptions of Hell and Heaven, and the 
speeches of the Soul to the Body after Death. 

These last mentioned pieces, one for the condemned 
soul, one for the blessed soul, exemplify the curious 
medieval belief that the soul after death, see § 26, visits 
the body every week, until the two shall be reunited at 
the judgment-day and consigned together to final bliss 
or final woe. There is no lack of similar pieces, prose 
and verse, in the medieval literature of every European 
nation. 

Equally curious are the traces of so-called ' animal 
symbolism.' In the earlier centuries of the Christian 
era it became a custom among Christians to regard cer- 
tain animals as symbolizing certain mysteries of the faith. 
Compendiums were made for ready reference ; such a 
compendium was called a physiologus. We possess re- 
mains of an Anglo-Saxon physiologus in the short poems 
which treat of the panther and the whale, and in the 
fragment of a poem on a curious bird entitled by Grein 
4 The Partridge.' The Panther, who retires to a se- 
cluded spot in the mountain-valley, sleeps three days, and 
on awaking utters sweet cries and exhales a delicious 
odor, symbolizes Christ, the risen Lord. The Whale, 
who beguiles unwary mariners into mistaking him for 
an island and climbing on his back, only to open his 
jaws and devour them, symbolizes Hell. We find rem- 
iniscences of superstitious belief in such treacherous 
floating islands even in modern literature. 



52 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

CHAPTER VII. 

CYNEWULF — RIDDLES, CHRIST, ELENE, &C. 

23. The person and writings of Caedmon, see § 20, 
are involved in uncertainty. But our knowledge of an- 
other of the great poets of early England is somewhat 
more definite. Cynewulf was born about the middle of 
the 8th century. He is usually held to be a native of 
Northumbria. He belonged in early life to the class of 
singers who wandered from court to court. His educa- 
tion had been got at a convent-school ; at all events he 
had some knowledge of Latin. 

Only one of his secular works has been preserved, viz., 
a collection of riddles in alliterate verse. The sugges- 
tions for these riddles he borrowed partly from Aldhelm, 
see § 19, partly from oral traditions of the folk. The 
Angles and Saxons, like the other Germans, had an in- 
born liking for oracular utterances and plays on words. 
One of the most celebrated encounters of wit is that 
narrated in the Vafthrudnismal of the elder Edda. Here 
the god Othin, assuming the form of a man and the 
name Gangradr, visits the giant Vafthrudnir in his hall. 
The two propound to each other the most difficult rid- 
dles, until at last Gangradr asks the giant what Othin 
had whispered in the ear of Balder when the latter was as- 
cending the funeral pile. At this the giant perceives 
that his antagonist is none other than the father of the 
gods and acknowledges himself overcome. His head is 
the forfeit. In this respect the Eddaic story resembles 
the Greek myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx. 

Cynewulf 's riddles are marked by imagination, a close 
observation of nature and the realities of life, and also a 



RIDDLES — POEM OF CHRIST. 53 

relish for social enjoyment. The following may serve as 
a specimen : 

J\le a while ago for dead gave up 

My father and mother ; I had no body as yet, 

Nor life within. Then a woman began, 

Well disposed, to cover me with garments, 

Kept and cherished me, enfolded me 

As faithfully as she did her own bairns, 

Until, under her lap, as my nature was, 

Under her foster lap I waxed in spirit. 

Me the protectress fed then 

Until I grew and was able 

To fly afar. She had the less 

Of sons and daughters of her own for thus doing. 

[Answer : A Cuckoo. 

Cynewulf, it is believed, passed the latter part of his 
life in a convent. His subsequent writings are all of a 
religious character. The poem called Christ, containing 
1690 verses, is composed in three parts : first, the Birth 
of Christ; second, the Ascension; third, the Coming at 
the Last Day. (Of part first the beginning is lost.) 
According to Professor ten Brink the substance of the 
poem is taken from Latin homilies, especially from those 
of Gregory the Great. The effect of the whole is that 
of a cycle of hymns, but liberally intermixed with epic 
and dramatic elements. In form it passes back and 
forth from narration to dialogue, from dialogue to 
ejaculations of praise. To quote Professor ten Brink's 
words, it is a majestic monument of deep religious feel- 
ing and keen, lofty intellect. The feeling of love and 
adoration for Christ and the Virgin reaches the highest 
pitch of expression, but without breaking into that 
sentimental strain which the later Christian poets of the 
12th and 13th centuries caught from the Minnesinger. 
Nowhere is the love of Christ described more earnestly, 
more touchingly, nowhere are the terrors of the last 
judgment depicted more forcibly. Among all our early 



54 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

English poems of religion, Cynewulf 's Christ is the one 
in which the spirit of the Latin church is exhibited at 
its best. On the other hand the Old-German conception 
of the comitatus, retinueship, or vassalage, is conspicu- 
ous, and we even seem to detect here and there a faint 
echo of those old pagan hymns that once must have 
celebrated the glories of Othin's Walhalla. 

24. The best known and most popular of Cynewulf 's 
works is the fflene, a legendary story of the expedition 
sent by the emperor Constantine to recover from the 
Holy Land the cross upon which Christ was put to 
death. The poem contains 1321 verses; the last 85 are 
personal. In them the poet speaks of himself as having 
been troubled in spirit at the recollection of a misspent 
life, until he is comforted by the contemplation of the 
Cross and its glory. He then introduces a passage in 
which, line by line, the runic names of the single letters 
composing his name are made to bear the alliteration 
and thus reveal the author. The passage has the effect 
of an acrostich. 

The story of the Finding of the Cross is one of the 
most interesting and characteristic legends of the early 
church, and has been preserved in a great variety of ver- 
sions in many languages. In Cynewulf's version the 
main points are these. In the year 233 Constantine, 
still a heathen, is attacked by his enemies, chiefly the 
Huns. (The date 233 is, of course, impossible. By 
slightly changing the order of words in Anglo-Saxon, 
we can get 332, which would come much nearer to the 
probable date of the emperor's conversion. But the 
Latin original followed by Cynewulf has the same fig- 
ures, 233.) In his sleep, on the eve of the battle which 
is to decide the fate»of his empire, an angel of the Lord 
appears and bids him shake off fear and look aloft for a 
sign of victory. He looks and beholds in the sky a glit- 



ELENE. 55 

tering cross bearing the inscription : With this sign 
shalt thou conquer thy enemies. (A translation of the 
familiar in hoc signo vinces) Awaking, the emperor or- 
ders a cross to be made immediately and carried before 
him. Wherever this cross is borne in the fight, the 
enemy is dismayed and routed. Having gained a com- 
plete victory, Constantine summons his wise men and 
bids them interpret this unknown symbol. They are at 
a loss for an answer. But at last some Christain soldiers 
venture to tell the story of Christ's life and death. The 
emperor accepts joyfully the new doctrine and is bap- 
tized. Being farther instructed in bible-history, he 
learns that Christ was put to death in Judea. There- 
upon he fits out an expedition, at the head of which he 
puts his mother Helena, to find if possible where the 
Cross had been hid. As soon as the empress reaches 
Jerusalem, she convenes the wise men learned in the 
law of Moses. They evade in various ways her persist- 
ent questionings. After meeting them thus four times 
without success, she throws one of their number, Judas, 
into prison and keeps him there six days without food. 
On the seventh day his resolution gives way and he 
promises to aid in the search. 

He guides the Christians to Calvary, but is unable to 
find the spot where the Cross has been hid. In his 
emergency he prays to God. This prayer, says Pro- 
fessor ten Brink, is a curious blending of Old-Hebrew 
fervor and Old-German pathos, tinged with Talmudic 
ideas of a hierarchy of angels surrounding the glory of 
the Father, § 21. He begs that the spot may be indi- 
cated by a cloud of smoke. His prayer is granted. He 
returns thanks, and they dig down twenty feet, when 
they discover three crosses. That is, they have found 
also the two on which the thieves were put to death. 
Returning to the city, they lay the three before the em- 
press, who rejoices with them but wishes to know which 



56 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

is the Savior's. Judas is completely at fault. They sing 
hymns to God until the ninth hour, when a company of 
mourners pass by, carrying to the grave the body of a 
young man. Judas orders them to stop and set the bier 
down. He holds, one after the other, two of the crosses 
over the corpse ; but it remains motionless as before. 
He then holds the third cross ; instantly the dead man 
arises, body and soul re-united. 

Messengers are sent to Constantine to inform him of the 
discovery. He returns word to erect a church on the 
spot where the cross was found. The cross is set in 
gold and precious stones and deposited in the church, in 
a silver casket. Judas is baptized. By order of the em- 
press, Bishop (Pope) Eusebius of Rome visits Jerusalem 
and consecrates Judas bishop of the new diocese. 
Henceforth Judas is known as Cyriacus. 

But Helena is not yet satisfied. She wishes to have 
the nails with which the feet and hands of the Savior 
were pierced. Once more Cyriacus proceeds to Calvary 
and prays. A bright flame shoots out of the ground. 
The nails are dug up and brought to the empress. Cy- 
riacus advises her to have them made into a bit for the 
emperor's bridle ; so long as the emperor shall guide his 
horse with this bit, so long shall he be victorious. The 
empress remains a while longer in Jerusalem, helping to 
build up the new Christian community. Cyriacus per- 
forms many miracles of healing. At her departure the 
empress bestows rich gifts on him and enjoins the church 
to celebrate the anniversary of the day on which the 
cross was found. It was the last day but six of spring. 
As summer began on the 9th of Ma}% according to the 
Anglo-Saxon calendar, this day would be the 3d of May. 

25. Another of Cynevvulfs poems* Juliana, narrates 
the martyrdom of a noble Christian woman of that 
name, supposed to have lived in the reign of the Roman 



PHOENIX. 57 

emperor Maximinian. Juliana refuses to wed a heathen 
husband, and for her steadfast resistance is frightfully 
tortured and put to death. Cynewulfs version is 
adapted from the Latin. 

The metrical Life of St. Guthlac is only in part the 
work of Cynewulf. It tells of the trials and tempta- 
tions of Guthlac, a hermit of England, who died 714. 
Cynewulfs share, the latter part, follows closely a Latin 
life of the saint by the monk Felix of Croyland. 

These four works, viz., the Riddles, Christ, Elene, and 
Juliana, with the portion of Guthlac, are all that. can be 
safely claimed for Cynewulf. Several other works were 
formerly ascribed to him, which are now disputed, viz: 
Andreas, The Phoenix, The Vision of the Rood, and vari- 
ous shorter pieces. 7 he Vision of the Rood is rather a fee- 
ble copy of the conclusion of Cynewulfs Christ (see be- 
ginning of § 24) than a work by the same author. It is 
monotonous and verbose. Andreas is the legendary (and 
extremely fabulous) story of the adventures and suffer- 
ing of St. Andrew, w T ho is sent by God to rescue St. 
Matthew from captivity in the land of the Mermedons. 
The poet, whoever he may have been, followed a Greek, 
not a Latin, version, as is shown by certain peculiar lo- 
cutions. The Phoenix, a poem of 677 verses, is a metri- 
cal rendering of a Latin poem ascribed to Lactantius, a 
church-father of the 4th century. Herodotus, who got 
the fable from the Egyptians, was the first to tell of this 
wonderful bird. The next writer of importance was 
Ovid. During the first century of the Christian era two 
slightly different versions sprang up. According to one, 
when the phoenix dies, a new bird arises from the dead 
body and buries it. According to the other, the phoenix 
burns himself, and a new bird arises from the ashes. 
The latter version is more usual, and is the one followed 
by Lactantius in his De Phoenice and by our early Eng- 
lish poet. But the English poem, from v. 380 on, de- 



58 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

velops an idea which is not in the Latin original at all, 
i.e., it applies the phoenix-myth to the Christian doc- 
trine of the resurrection. The new-born phoenix is 
made to symbolize the risen Lord and the elect. This 
added part is of course the most interesting. 

Among the minor poems of this period, although not 
to be connected with Cynewulf, are The Lament of Deor, 
remarkable for its being the only poem composed in 
strophes (or stanzas), The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The 
Ruin, The Message of the Husband to his Wife, and a col- 
lection of pithy sayings, usually called 'gnomic 5 verses. 
All except the gnomic verses are marked by a strong 
undercurrent of sadness. It is impossible to discover 
their authors, or even to determine accurately the times 
when they were composed. But in all probability they 
are anterior to the reis-n of Kin 2^ Alfred* 



CHAPTEli VIII. 



CHRONICLE. 



26. Mention has been made in § 11 of the troubles 
caused in the early part of Alfred's reign by the Danish 
invasions. In 878 a treaty was concluded at Wedmore, 
which practically divided England into a northeastern 
portion under Danish overrule, and a southwestern, 
Wessex, under Alfred. 

Having conquered peace, Alfred bent his energies to 
the task of repairing the terrible damages that had been 
wrought. He paid as much attention to restoring p ety 
and learning as to political and military reform. Not 
content with rebuilding and endowing schools and 
churches, he set in his own person an extraordinary ex- 



orosius. 59 

ample of unceasing literary activity. Late in life he be- 
gan the study of Latin and translated numerous works 
into the vernacular. Nearly all his writings have been 
preserved. They fully establish his claim to be regarded 
as the father of our English prose. 

The first work that he translated was a Latin history 
of the world, composed about 418 by a Spanish monk 
named Orosius. The Latin original is a mere compila- 
tion, immethodical and uncritical. But it has one merit; 
it is the first attempt to write history from an interna- 
tional point of view. Its spirit is orthodox-christian, 
but its tone, we might say, is cosmopolitan. It is cer- 
tainly not exclusively Greek or exclusively Latin. The 
seven books of Orosius were a favorite work throughout 
the early middle ages. We have seen, § 19, that Becle 
consulted them. In translating the first chapter of the 
first book, Alfred inserted some materials of his own, 
viz., a description prepared by himself of all the coun- 
tries that were then occupied by German-speaking tribes, 
and two reports of exploring voyages, written down by 
him from the dictation of the men who had made the 
voyages. Ohthere, starting from his home on the western 
coast of Norway, had doubled the North Cape and ex- 
plored the White Sea as far as the mouth of the river 
Dwina. He was undoubtedly the first man of Germanic 
descent to discover those regions. The other traveler, 
Wulfstan, starting from what is now the town of Sles- 
wig, explored the coast of the Baltic as far as Danzig 
and Konigsberg. These two reports and Alfred's de- 
scription are the most interesting and valuable contribu- 
tions that we possess to the ethnography of the times. 

Alfred's next translation was from Bede's Historia, 
see § 19. This was followed by a free rendering of the 
celebrated work by Boethius, De Consolatione Philoso- 
'phiae. Boethius, often called the ' Last of the Romans,' 
was a prominent statesman and philosopher of the 6th 



60. ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

century. Being charged, unjustly it is now believed, 
with complicity in a conspiracy against the Gothic king, 
Theoderic, he was thrown into prison and finally executed, 
525. It was during his imprisonment that he composed 
his Consolatio. The work is in the main an embodiment 
of Neo-Platonic doctrines, bat with a considerable ad- 
mixture of Stoicism. Its Christianity is rather superfi- 
cial, forBoethius was only a Christian in name. But by 
reason of its clear and elegant style and the good sense 
of its teachings, it became almost immediately a popular 
work among churchmen and exerted a wonderful influ- 
ence upon all medieval writers, lay no less than clerical. 
Chaucer, for instance, never wearies of citing Boethius, 
and for several centuries after Chaucer we^may observe 
the Consolatio still maintaining its hold upon men of 
learning. Alfred's translation, or rather paraphrase, can 
make no pretense to the elegance of the original. 

The work upon which Alfred bestowed most pains is 
the translation of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care, a 
treatise by the great pope upon the true nature of the 
priestly vocation and the proper way of fulfilling its 
duties. Gregory's teachings were peculiarly applicable 
to the English clergy in Alfred's reign, who were very 
imperfectly trained. Hence the King ordered a copy of 
his translation to be kept in every cathedral church of 
his realm. Two of these very manuscripts still remain ; 
one is much injured, the other is entire except a single 
leaf at the end. They exhibit the actual language of the 
south of England in the 9th century, as it was written 
down under the eyes of the King, and are consequently 
of the highest philological value. Alfred's Preface, in 
the form of a letter to Bishop Werferth, gives a forcible 
account of the disorganization and ignorance of the 
country during the early part of his reign, and the ener- 
getic measures he employed to disseminate knowledge. 

Another work of Gregory's, the so-called Dialogues, 



Gregory's dialogues. 61 

was not translated by Alfred himself, but by his friend 
Werfertk, bishop of Worcester. These Dialogues em- 
body the views of the pope upon the lives and miracles 
of the early Italian saints. They owe their title to the 
circumstance that they are put into the shape of a series 
of imaginary conversations between Gregory and his 
archdeacon Peter. The fourth (last) book exerted a re- 
markable influence upon medieval literature. It treats 
of the life of the soul after death, see § 22, and recounts 
many of the ' visions' of spiritual and supernatural 
things vouchsafed to holy men in the early church. 
Closely connected with the visions was the doctrine of 
6 purgatory,' which was in process of establishment in 
Gregory's day. From Gregory's Latin Dialogues these 
visions and purgatorial wonders passed into early Irish 
literature, where they were developed freely and trans- 
fused with Keltic superstition, f rming a department by 
themselves. The doctrine of purgatory became perma- 
nently associated with the name of Patrick, the patron 
saint of Ireland. As retold and modified by Irish monks, 
the literature of visions spread over all Europe, assum- 
ing a more popular shape in the Arthurian romances. 

27, For a statement of the general relations between 
Wessex and R"orthumbria, in the matter of prose and 
poetry, see § 11. 

Wessex is entitled to the additional credit of having 
originated the beginnings of national historiography in 
the vernacular. It had long been a custom among 
monks throughout Europe to jot down, in Latin, yenr 
by year, brief notices of important events, such as royal 
births, deaths, marriages, great battles, and other changes, 
especially in the monastic order itself and in the church. 
These notices are usually as meagre and matter-of-fact as 
memoranda entered in a private diary. But it seems 
that the monks of Canterbury and Winchester must have 



OZ ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

begun at an early date to write their notices, not in Latin 
but in the vernacular. During the reign of Etheiwulf, 
Alfred's father, the first attempt was made to work up 
these scattered items into something like a continuous 
narrative. The history of the Angles and Saxons was 
carried back to the days of Hengist and Horsa, and 
King Etheiwulf 's pedigree traced through Othin to Noah 
and Adam. All that part of this first Winchester redac- 
tion which deals with persons and events anterior to the 
7th century is of questionable value, and is probably, to 
a large extent, mere popular tradition. Passages here 
and there read like scraps of ancient poetry turned into 
prose. But the part dealing with the 7th century and 
8th century is authentic, being probably taken in sub- 
stance from early monkish records. 

Towards the end of Alfred's reign the annals under- 
went a second redaction, which continued the thread of 
narrative clown to 891. The new matter consists chiefly 
of the events of Alfred's wars with the Danes, and has 
therefore all the value of a contemporary record. But 
those who had the second redaction in charge interpo- 
lated a good many passages in the preceding part, i.e., in 
the fabulous history of early Britain. They carried the 
narrative back as far as 60 B. C. These interpolations 
are not taken from popular tradition but from Bede's 
Historia. Probably the respect thus shown to Bede was 
due to King Alfred's wishes. 

After Alfred's death the record was resumed — we can 
not say where or by whom — and continued to 924, the 
year in which Alfred's son, Edward, was at the height of 
his power and ruler over nearly all England. Professor 
ten Brink ascribes this entire section of thirty years, 
891-924, to the pen of a single writer, who must have 
been a man of great ability and the best prosaist of Old- 
England. His style is unusually clear and vigorous. 

The annals for the next half century, 924-975, are 



CHRONICLE. 63 

meagre and dry. They are enlivened only by the inser- 
tion of four episodes, narrated in alliterative verse. 
First, the victory of Athelstan over the Scotch and 
Northmen, at Brunanburh; second, the annexation of 
the five Danish ' boroughs ' of Leicester, Lincoln, Not- 
tingham, Stamford, Derby, 924; third, Edgar's corona- 
tion at Bath, 973 ; fourth, Edgar's death, 975. 

About 1000 the annals seem to have been trans- 
ferred from Winchester to Canterbury, Worcester, and 
Abingdon. In Worcester, about 1016, a further redactiou 
was made, by interpolating many facts and dates relating 
to Northumbria and Mercia, which had been collected in 
the course of the 9th and 10th centuries. Another re- 
daction was made in Abingdon, about 1046. The two 
versions, the Worcester and the Abingdon, then con- 
tinue, between them, the story of England under the 
Danish king Knut, under Edward the Confessor, Good- 
win, and Harold, down to the battle of Hastings. 

After the Norman Conquest, composition of every sort 
in the language of the conquered was neglected. The 
annals merely shared in the general decay, until at last 
they died a natural death, 1154, when Henry II. ascended 
the throne. The additions made from 1066-1154 are 
meagre enough. Some were made at Canterbury; a few 
more at Worcester. The principal redaction of this pe- 
riod was made at Peterborough. In 1116 the cathedral 
and nearly all the adjacent buildings, with their books 
and other documents, were destroyed by fire. This fur- 
nished the occasion for rewriting the entire record. The 
writers consulted the earlier records of Winchester, 
Worcester, Canterbury, and Abingdon; also the local 
records of Peterborough. They interpolated some 
forged charters purporting to convey gifts to the abbey, 
and brought the story down to 1121. From 1121-1131 
this Peterborough record was kept up year by year. 



. 



64 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

The section from 1132-1154, as it now stands, was prob- 
ably acjded by a siogle scribe, in 1154. 

The entire record, whether early or late, whether pre- 
pared at Winchester, Canterbury, Worcester, Abingdon, 
or Peterborough, is usually entitled the Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle. It is in the main dry and tedious reading, 
imperfect, abrupt, not always intelligible or accurate. 
Yet it is a most valuable document to the historian and 
to the grammarian ; it is moreover worthy of honor for 
being the first great and sustained effort on the part 
of a modern folk to tell its own history in its own speech. 



CHAPTER IX. 

ALFRIC — SOLOMON & SATURN, &C. — DECLINE OF POETRY. 

28* For the sake of unity, all the parts of the Anglo- 
Saxon Chronicle have been mentioned in § 27, although 
many of them belong in point of time to the present 
chapter. 

The literature of England from the death of Alfred 
to the Norman Conquest is more abundant than the 
earlier literature, but is in general much less interesting. 
It is almost altogether a prose literature, and is dry and 
didatic in style. It bears witness to the dying out of the 
great creative impulse in poetry. 

Among the more curious productions of the period is 
the Laece Boc (Leech Book), a compilation of rules and 
prescriptions for the treatment of various diseases. As 
might be expected from the low state of medical study in 
the middle ages, the compilation swarms with fantastic 
notions. Many forms of disease are attributed to evil 
spirits, for which the cure consists in incantations and ex- 
orcisms. Some of the formulas are in verse, and date 



ALFRIC. 65 

perhaps from heathen times. Not a few of the supersti- 
tions still survive among English rustics. The Laece 
Bog is based upon a Latin compilation, supposed to be 
the work of one Apulejus, a Roman physician of the last 
days of the Empire. 

The chief prose writings are of a religious character, 
and may be regarded as a continuation of the work of 
instruction begun by Alfred. The great reformer of the 
10th century was St. Dunstau, Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, whose efforts were directed to winning back the 
priests from worldly amusements, to enforcing celibacy 
among them, and to establishing the strict rule of St. 
Benedict in the monasteries. But St. Dunstan has left no 
writings in English. What he neglected to do, was more 
than made good by Alfric, Abbot of Ensham. Alfric, 
who died about 1020, was a pupil of the celebrated 
school at Winchester and the most indefatigable writer 
of his times. The more important of his works are : 
1. A collection of 80 and more homilies, entitled Catholi- 
cae. • 2. An interlinear version of selections from Pris- 
cian's Latin grammar, and an interlinear Colloquium, or 
dialogue between teacher and pupil, so planned as to 
facilitate the learning of Latin words and phrases. 3. A 
collection of homilies on the lives of the saints, entitled 
Passiones Sanctorum. 4. A translation of the Pentateuch 
(omitting passages here and there), of Joshua, Judges, 
and Job. 5. An Introduction to the Study of the Old 
and New Testament. Several of these writings are in 
alliteration, e.g., the greater part of the Passiones, and 
the books of Numbers, Joshua, and Judges. The allit- 
eration is, to say the least, a mistake on the author's 
part. It has not the power of the old heathen poetry 
nor the grace of Cynewulf's poetry. It does not con- 
form to the rules of alliterative verse; in fact it is little 
more than slightly versified prose, and is much inferior 
to his regular prose. But, notwithstanding this weak- 



66 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

ness, Alfric was the model of ail industrious scholar, and 
indisputably the most influential writer of English after 
King Alfred. The above list gives but a fraction of his 
numerous writings. 

Somewhat earlier in time than Alfric is the Northum- 
brian interlinear version of the gospels, made in Lindis- 
farn and transferred to Durham when that city became 
the seat of the bishopric. Also earlier than Alfric by a 
few years is a collection of homilies preserved in the 
Blickling MS. Later probably than Alfric, certainly 
not by him, is the Wessex translation of the gospels. 

29. An interesting poem of this period is one entitled 
Solomon and Saturn. Solomon symbolizes Christian, 
Saturn heathen wisdom; the poem is in the form of 
a dialogue or encounter of wits, in which — as might be 
expected — Solomon comes off victorious. The theme 
was a favorite one in the middle ages ; but, although it 
must have originated in the east, we have no version, 
Latin, Greek, or otherwise, earlier than the Anglo-Saxon. 
Solomon as representative of christian doctrine calls for 
no explanation. But it is not so easy to account for the 
introduction of Saturn. It is believed that there was a 
Jewish tradition according to which Solomon figured as 
the champion of Jewish wisdom against Marcolis, an 
oriental divinity corresponding to the classic god Mer- 
cury. Among German-speaking nations the oriental 
name Marcolis was converted into Marculf; and this 
form is still retained in the continental-German versions 
of the story. But in England the name Marcolis seems 
to have been confounded with Malcol (Milcol), i.e., 
Moloch, the name of another oriental divinity corres- 
ponding to Saturn. Thus the word Saturn came to be 
substituted in England for Marculf. The old English 
version is quite fragmentary, and — like all mystical writ- 
ings — is obscure. A large part of it consists in Solo- 



BATTLE OF MALDON. 67 

mon's going through the Pater Noster for Saturn's edifi- 
cation, interpreting each letter as if it were a rune. The 
continental versions, notably the French, differ from the 
English in giving to the dialogue a burlesque tone, and 
the wit not infrequently becomes profane and scurrilous. 
Another and more important production is the metri- 
cal paraphrase of the book of Psalms, made not later 
than the middle of the 10th century. (An earlier ver- 
sion of the 50th Psalm has been mentioned, § 22). For 
the songs inserted in the Chronicle, see § 27. Superior 
in every way to these chronicle-songs is one composed 
near the end of the 10th century. It is a poem of 325 
verses, (both introduction and conclusion are wanting), 
in commemoration of Byrhtnoth, and is called either 
ByrhtnotKs Death or The Battle of Maldon. In the year 
991 a band of Northmen landed on the eastern coast of 
England. They were attacked near Maldon by Byrht- 
noth at the head of a few hastily gathered troops. The 
contest was long and desperate. Byrhtnoth fell, but the 
invaders were checked. The poem is one of the most 
spirited in the language and fully worthy of a place beside 
Beowulf and the Battle of Finnsburh. It must have been 
composed immediately after the battle, for the author 
appears not to have known the name of the Danish 
leader, which is given as Anlaf in the Chronicle. 

30« The poetry of the 11th century exhibits unmis- 
takable signs of a transition period. It is the business 
of the grammarian to examine these changes in detail. 
All that can be attempted in this place is to mention 
some of the most marked. 1. The alliteration becomes 
more and more careless ; almost any similarity of sound 
is regarded as sufficient. 2. Less care is taken to let the 
alliteration rest on the emphatic words in the line. 3. 
There is a tendency to make the transitions of meaning 
coincide with the end of the full line. This is in direct 



68 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

opposition to the style of the earlier poetry, which 
usually carries the syntactic meaning over from one line 
to the next. Inasmuch as the caesura, or half-way 
pause, is still kept up, the full line is thus divided mo- 
notonously into two halves. 4. These halves are fre- 
quently made to rime. This is a decisive step towards 
the riming eight-syllable or ten-syllable c couplets ' which 
were the predominant metre of France and Germany 
from the 10th to the 14th century. The following pas- 
sage, taken from the Chronicle, sub anno 1036, will make 
all these points clear. It describes the fate of Alfred, 
son of Ethelred. 

Sona swa he lende, on scype mon hine blende 
And hine swa blindne brohte to tham munecon, 
And he thaer wunode tha hwile the he leofode. 
Syththan hine man byrigde, swa him wel gebyrde, 
Aet tham westende tham stypele ful-gehende 
On tham suthportice ; seo sawul is mid Christe. 

As soon as he landed, on the ship they him blinded, 
A-nd him thus blind brought (they) to the monks 
And there he dwelt (all) the while he lived. 
Afterwards they him buried, as him well befitted, 
At the west end, the steeple (tower) hard by, 
In the south portal ; his soul is with Christ. 

Rimes like lende : blende, wunode : lufode, byrigde : 
gebyrde, encle: gehende, portice: Christe, are unmis- 
takable, and the two halves of each line make a couplet. 

It is important to note these symptoms. They show 
how erroneous it would be to attribute the disintegra- 
tion of the' early language and literature solely to the 
Norman Conquest. The truth is that tendencies to 
change had long been at work in England, no less 
than in Germany. Thus there are several riming pas- 
sages in Cynewulfs poems and in the Phoenix. But 
the English maintained their primitive system longer 
than the Germans, for the victory of rime over allit- 



SIGNS OF TRANSITION. 69 

eration was complete in Germany by the end of the 
9th century. Even had the Normans never invaded 
England, the English would have developed eight and 
ten-syllable riming couplets in imitation of the French, 
just as the Germans did. And they would also have 
patterned their literature after the French romances 
that were then fast becoming the fashion. The Nor- 
man Conquest accelerated the substitution of rime for 
alliteration, and the importation of romance-literature. 
But the process would have gone on, more slowly, it 
is true, without the Normans. 

In evidence that literary taste in England was chang- 
ing, it will suffice to cite the fact that the story of 
Apollonius of Tyre and the Letters of Alexander the 
Great to Aristotle, fabulous subjects taken from the 
later Greek prose romances, were translated into English 
before the Conquest. The Old-German heroic spirit 
and heroic verse were doomed to pass away before the 
new era of sentimentality and adventure. 



^ 



3^ 



7* 



SYLLABUS 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 



BY 



J. M. HART 

(UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI) 



ADAPTED FROM BERNHARD TEN BRINK'S 
QESCH1CHTE DER ENGLISCBEN LITTERATVR 



CINCINNATI 
KOBEBT CLARKE & CO 

1881 



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